Sohla El-Waylly: Gochujang is fermented soy and chili paste. We love it. It's another staple in our home. It's almost like if miso had a baby with mole.

Ham El-Waylly: It's like miso in its bad boy phase. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Woah. 

Ham El-Waylly: It's fiery, it's spicy, it's sassy.

Sohla El-Waylly: Miso that's been hanging out with the wrong crowd. 

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah. 

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] 

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: Welcome to Deep Dish, the show where we do deep dives on dishes we love, and then cook them. I'm Sohla.

Ham El-Waylly: And I'm Ham.

Sohla El-Waylly: We're married ... 

Ham El-Waylly: And we're chefs.

Sohla El-Waylly: We nerd out on food together all day long.

Ham El-Waylly: And we love learning about the stories behind different dishes and ingredients. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Now we're going to do all that nerding out on this podcast.

Ham El-Waylly: In each episode of Deep Dish, we'll deep dive into the story behind a food.

Sohla El-Waylly: Then we’ll head home to our kitchen, and see what we feel inspired to cook up. Today’s story: A brief history of Korea, as told through a rice cake.

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: I, like, have this theory — I feel like I've told you about this a lot, but I feel like when you immigrate to this country, or you, like, are first generation, you really are frozen in your culture at that time. Like my parents are frozen in Bangladesh in the 1970s. And like ... 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. Because that's when they moved.

Sohla El-Waylly: That's what we — that's like the culture I was raised in. That's the culture that my sister continues it's like 1970s Bangladesh values. When you leave a country, you feel like you have to hold onto those values so tightly. 

Ham El-Waylly: The value that you remember. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. It’s hard to evolve and you see it with food and you see it with a lot of other things. But in Bangladesh, all my cousins are, like, way more modern. They're way more interesting with their food. They're way more diverse with their cuisine and their culture and they're way more open minded. 

Sohla El-Waylly: The people who left, they can get more hung up on the correct, authentic way to make something. They want the version they remember, or grew up with. Maybe its an effort to hold onto a piece of yourself that you feel like you’re losing when you come here? But what if there was a third way that nods to history and nostalgia while also evolving. That possibility is why I was really excited to talk to Ji Hye Kim.

Ji Hye Kim: Are you the Sohla of New York Times? 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yes, I am. 

Ji Hye Kim: Oh my god! Okay.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Ji Hye Kim: I was totally fangirling. Okay.

Sohla El-Waylly: That was nice of her. [LAUGHS] 

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah, that was very, very nice

Sohla El-Waylly: So Ji Hye was born in Seoul, and came to the U.S at 13. She’s the chef and owner of the Korean restaurant Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, Michigan. When she started planning her menu for her restaurant, she fell down a bit of a Korean food history rabbit hole. A lot of her research focused on one dish in particular, a dish that’s tied up with the history of Korea itself, and that has special significance for Ji Hye. That dish is tteokbokki. 

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: Tteokbokki are Korean rice cakes. Sometimes when people hear “rice cake,” they think of those puffy, crispy Quaker rice cakes that I like to put peanut butter on, but that’s not what this is. This is going to be like chewy, almost like a mochi, like a dumpling, thick noodle kind of situation.

Ham El-Waylly: Oh, they're delicious. And you can find them in all different shapes. They have them flattened, they got them long and cylindrical.

Sohla El-Waylly: It can be stewed or sautéed or skewered.

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah, I think my favorite traditional Korean way is when it's braised in that fiery red sauce ... 

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. 

Ham El-Waylly: And it has fish cakes.

Sohla El-Waylly: With tons of gochujang. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's my favorite way because I love the interplay between, like, the dense, chewy fish cake and then more tender chewy tteokbokki.

Sohla El-Waylly: This is a noodle for people who love texture. 

Ham El-Waylly: Yes.

Sohla El-Waylly: It's all about the texture. And in South Korea …

Ji Hye Kim: It's the quintessential street food and it's like number one thing to order for your delivery apps.

Sohla El-Waylly: Is there something — is there a food in the U.S. you can compare it to? 

Ji Hye Kim: Oh, I think the closest, closest thing I can think of is, hot dogs or pizza — something that common, and easily accessible and cheap.

Sohla El-Waylly: And as a food obsessed kid growing up in South Korea, Ji Hye had a special interest in tteokbokki. 

Ji Hye Kim: When I was first grade, I was allowed to start walking to school by myself, and I always chose the route that walked through the traditional food market.

Sohla El-Waylly: By second grade, she sees all these food vendors near her school, and she wants some of that street food. I mean how could you not?

Ham El-Waylly: Oh, of course. I feel like every time you walk by someone making tteokbokki, and you just smell that, like, kinda spicy, kinda sweet, scent in the air. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. 

Ham El-Waylly: It makes you hungry. 

Sohla El-Waylly: It pulls you in. Yeah, and but she had a little problem. 

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] 

Ji Hye Kim: My mom was sort of like a matriarch. She's a firstborn of her generation and she didn't believe in really going out to eat and she certainly did not believe in street food. And my mom disapproved this very much and called it a delinquent food.

Sohla El-Waylly: Why was she against the street food? Do you have an idea?

Ji Hye Kim: Oh, she's like, too salty, too heavy, not clean, not sanitary, not a homemade food. And then she was slightly personally offended. Why would you wanna eat any other food than the food that your mom labored to make for you? [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh, sounds just like my mom. [LAUGHS

Ji Hye Kim: Yeah, yeah. All the wrong things were tteokbokki in her mind.

Ham El-Waylly: Oh, the guilt trip. The classic, classic Asian parent guilt trip. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. It's like how your mom would never get you a Hot Pocket. You had to wait until you're an adult with your own money to get a Hot Pocket.

Ham El-Waylly: Not my own money, the New York Times money.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] Yeah. Yeah. My mom was exactly like this, and it drove me crazy, because all I wanted was Nachos Bellgrande. So Ji Hye’s in the same position. But when she’s walking to school, those tteokbokki street vendors are very tempting.

Sohla El-Waylly: Now remember, she doesn't have cash cause she is a child. 

[LAUGHING] 

Sohla El-Waylly: But she sees other kids in her class eating tteokbokki and she's wondering how the hell are they pulling this off?

Ji Hye Kim: One day, I saw a classmate hand a milk carton to the vendor, and the vendor just handed him a five sticks of tteokbokki. What's really interesting is that there was no discussion, like it was a silent trade. [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: So this is like a pre-discussed agreement. It was just milk for tteokbokki.

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh, uh-huh. So she wanted to give it a shot, see if she could pull off this trade just like the other kids.

Ji Hye Kim: So I held onto my milk for like four hours at room temperature in my bag.

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. 

Ji Hye Kim: Horrible. And then I waited until the class was out, and then I would hand it to her, and then she would quietly hand me a plate of tteokbokki. And that's my first experience enjoying the tteokbokki. And my mom actually still doesn't know this story.

Sohla El-Waylly: Ji Hye still remembers her first bite of tteokbokki.

Ji Hye Kim: I remember the texture being very comforting because it's soft and chewy and it was just a little bit spicy. So it was a little more spicier than I was accustomed to as a child that my mom allowed, but it was also sweeter than my mom's cooking. And I think what I really tasted was mischief. It felt like out of norm and I was doing something wrong and it was very fun.

Sohla El-Waylly: It became a really big problem. There were more than a few kids trading milk for tteokbokki. So, it became such a big issue at her school that the authorities had to step in.

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] 

Ji Hye Kim: There was this announcement that you shouldn't do that. It's against the rule. But if you come clean, we'll forgive you.

Sohla El-Waylly: Well, I think that the school made a big mistake by making this announcement. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. 

Sohla El-Waylly: It kind of reminds me of the D.A.R.E. program. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Where all it did was teach me about drugs. a

Ham El-Waylly: Uh-huh, and then you're curious.

Sohla El-Waylly: And make me want to do it more. 

Ham El-Waylly: And then you become curious. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I was like, oh, let's find this gateway drug.

Ham El-Waylly: So I'm sure they made it worse.

Sohla El-Waylly: They definitely made it worse. All the kids in her school were trading their milk for tteokbokki or other food from street vendors. But then, one of her classmates finds out that she’s doing this, and he blackmails her. He tells her that if she doesn't do all of his penmanship homework, he'll tell on her. He’s gonna rat her out.

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] He’s threatening to snitch.

Sohla El-Waylly: He's threatening to snitch. Have you ever heard of so much drama in the second grade?

Ham El-Waylly: All over milk and tteokbokki.

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh.

Ji Hye Kim: And so I was — I find myself standing in the moral crossroad of like, being an upstanding citizen, come clean, be forgiven for my sins, or I continue this illicit trait. And I — all I gotta tell you is that my handwriting is really beautiful.

MUSIC

Ji Hye Kim: In December of 1991, my father said, Do you guys want to move to the United States? But it wasn't, the word that he used wasn't really "move". The word that he used was like, "Do you want to go to the United States?" so I didn't give a lot of thought. I was like, yeah, sure.

Sohla El-Waylly: So at 13, she left Korea, and moved to the suburbs of New Jersey, where there were no more tteokbokki stalls. 

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Sohla El-Waylly: You know? No more milk trades. And that's when she realized that she was really far away from her Korean roots, and she was really far away from her extended family. Like, she grew up with a really big community of Korean people. She talked a lot about how they would get together on the holidays and cook together and have big meals, and she lost all of that.

Ji Hye Kim: Everything I remember of Korean food was the little bit that I remember from my own experiences living there until age 13. Like up until that point, Korean food was frozen in my head.

Sohla El-Waylly: And then she went to school in the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where there was an even smaller Korean community. 

Ji Hye Kim: Back then, I think we had maybe two to three Korean restaurants. And I remember thinking that several dishes tasted the same. So I just knew that they had, like, one type of sauce that they made and they were just throwing that into every single dish. So I was eating it to scratch an itch or satisfy homesickness, but it wasn't — I mean, it wasn't great.

Sohla El-Waylly: When Ji Hye graduated from college, she lost her student visa. For years, she worked in hospitals, just because they would sponsor her green card. But then, she got married, and she no longer had to rely on a work visa to stay in the country.

Ji Hye Kim: That was the first time that I was able to ask myself what it is that I actually wanna do. So when that question came up to my head, that's when I started working at Zingerman's.

Sohla El-Waylly: Zingerman's is a food institution in Ann Arbor. It opened in the '80s as a Jewish deli, and it's turned into a specialty food store where you can get, like, pâtés, salamis, aged cheese, and all kinds of premium foods.

Ji Hye Kim: I was cheesemonger for a while. So first thing I would do when I go into the shop would be taste all the cheeses that I wanna focus on. And I couldn't believe for a while that I was getting paid to learn about Parmigiano Reggiano .. 

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] 

Ji Hye Kim: And meet the balsamic vinegar makers. [LAUGHS] So we were constantly tasting stuff. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh so you got to eat the Parmesan right out of the wheel.

Ji Hye Kim: Right when I crack it. 

Sohla El-Waylly: That's an amazing thing.

Ji Hye Kim: Yeah.

Sohla El-Waylly: I feel like I’ve only had it once and it's dreamy.

Ji Hye Kim: It is amazing and I was so good at cracking it [SOHLA EL-WAYLLY LAUGHS] so that there was not a lot of crumbs. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. 

Ji Hye Kim: Like I would crack it exactly. 

MUSIC

Ji Hye Kim: But that's when I started wondering like, you know, what if it was like this for Korean food? What if somebody knew about Korean food — the history of it, the ingredient, the artisanal makers, traditional methods, all the recipes and the pairings? Because I'm doing it for Italian food or French food, but not for Korean food. And I go to a Korean grocery store and I speak the language, but if I ask like questions like, "Where is this gochujang coming from?" or "Is this made with traditional sweet rice or is this made with barley, like from that, like a mountain region in Korea?", they'll just tell me to read the ingredient list.

Ham El-Waylly: That is something that is missing in anything outside of French, Italian, and a little bit of Spanish.

Sohla El-Waylly: When you present food in that way, that's when it really feels valuable. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. 

Sohla El-Waylly: You know, you're elevating it when you give it that respect and you know everything about it. 

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: With this idea in mind, Ji Hye decided to open her own restaurant. There was just one problem: She didn’t know how to cook Korean food. She grew up eating it but her mom never taught her how to cook it. So Ji Hye taught herself. And she did a lot of research in the process. 

Ji Hye Kim: I needed to know what my ancestors did and how it changed over the centuries for me to really understand Korean cuisine. So then I just started looking at old Korean cookbooks.

Sohla El-Waylly: One thing she quickly learned, Korean food is very regional and seasonal. So here, we have four seasons, but in Korea the year is divided into 24 different seasons. They take seasonality to a whole new level. She decided to honor that by creating a menu with local, seasonal ingredients in Michigan.

Sohla El-Waylly: But she knew that if she started messing with traditional dishes, it might upset some people. That was another reason she was doing all this research. She wanted to make sure her food was backed up by history. 

Ji Hye Kim: I wanted to be able to defend it.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yes, I understand that very much. [LAUGHS] 

Ji Hye Kim: Yeah, it was like a reaction to potential Yelp review.

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. Yeah. I like to have all the information so I can also have an a defense.

Ji Hye Kim: Yeah. So I was getting my duck in a row. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. 

Ji Hye Kim: Get the historical evolution of the dish ready in my head to just like expound on if somebody challenged my dish.

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: Coming up, Ji Hye continues her research, and makes a discovery that she thinks gives her permission to do whatever the hell she wants with tteokbokki. Then, her restaurant opens, and she takes on the haters. Stick around.

MUSIC

+++ BREAK+++

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: Welcome back to Deep Dish. I'm Sohla.

Ham El-Waylly: And I'm Ham.

Sohla El-Waylly: And hey, Ham! Did you know that I have cookbook out called Start Here?

Ham El-Waylly: You mean the cookbook that's perfect for both beginners and advanced cooks because there's something to learn for everybody>

Sohla El-Waylly: Absolutely. And I'm currently on tour. I will be in L.A. January 25th and January 28th. Then I'm heading to San Francisco, January 29th, Portland the 31st, and the grand finale of my book tour will be in Seattle, February 1st. Come! Come see me one of these days. Why the hell not? For all the tour dates and more info, head over to my website helloSohla.com.

Ham El-Waylly: Okay, let’s get back to the show.

Sohla El-Waylly: Ham, earlier I said that if you look at the history of tteokbokki, you can also see the history of Korea. And if you want to understand Korean history, the first place to look is on a map.

Ji Hye Kim: There is this phrase that says Korea is like the shrimp that's sandwiched between big whales. And it’s because it borders China, it borders Russia, and there's Japan on the other side. So we're strategically located for big powerful countries to want to colonize us, or at least imparts some strong influence on Korean peninsula.

Sohla El-Waylly: For centuries, China had a huge cultural influence on Korea, on its art, religion, language, and food. Ji Hye was looking at old cookbooks to find the roots of Korean cooking. What she found was that these cookbooks fell into two separate categories, in two different languages. 

Ji Hye Kim: Some are originally written in Chinese, which is a language of scholars, and to that extent language of men, because only men are really allowed to be scholars. And then some of them are written in Korean, which is considered lowly written system. It's considered language of, uh, women.

Sohla El-Waylly: There were recipes in both kinds of books, but different kinds of recipes. The Chinese books had recipes for fancier foods. So you could only access those dishes if you were a man from the educated upper class. It was out of reach for most Koreans. The Korean language books had recipes for what we think of as home cooking, and it was geared more towards women. And these books were looked down upon. 

Sohla El-Waylly: In the early 1800s, a dish showed up in one of these books, and that dish looked a lot like tteokbokki. And guess what? That book is written in Chinese! Tteokbokki started out as the food of royalty.

Ham El-Waylly: So the food that nowadays is on the level of hot dogs and pizza used to be the food of kings and queens. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, and it looked very different from what you find on the street today.

Ji Hye Kim: It was dish of the royal family because they added all these rich ingredients. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Ji Hye Kim: Beef and soy sauce and a bunch of vegetables. So it was a fancy dish.

Sohla El-Waylly: This was luxe. It was expensive, and it makes sense that it was royal food because it was so hard to make. 

Ji Hye Kim: It took three adult men to make the rice cake from scratch

Sohla El-Waylly: There’s two guys with mallets. 

Ji Hye Kim: And they were taking turns pounding the rice.

Sohla El-Waylly: There’s like a guy that’s crouched on the ground, he has the dangerous job. And the guy whose squatting down, will fold it. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hm. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Another guy will hit it. And all I keep thinking is, man, if you just mess up one beat ... 

Ham El-Waylly: You kill someone. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Or you break their hand. Technique tells you a lot about whether something is fancy or not.

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm.

Sohla El-Waylly: Cause back then you just had a burner with no control over the heat. Maybe it was a fire pit.

Ham El-Waylly: So everything was braised.

Sohla El-Waylly: Everything was braised, or boiled, or simmered. But tteokbokki in the royal court was sauteed. In fact, tteokbokki means sauteed rice cake in Korean. And sauteeing was more upscale in these times because it required, you know, more control over the heat level .... 

Ham El-Waylly: Special equipment ... 

Sohla El-Waylly: Precision ...

Ham El-Waylly: It’s easy for one person to do a bunch of different braises, because you kind of — it’s like the "set it and forget it" cooking method. 

Sohla El-Waylly: As long as the pot doesn’t go dry, it’ll be fine. 

Ham El-Waylly: Exactly. But like a sautee, you need to be vigilant, you need to be active, you need to be present. 

Sohla El-Waylly: And you need a proper pan.

Sohla El-Waylly: There was one more big difference from the tteokbokki of today. In the royal court there was no gochujang, because chili peppers hadn’t been introduced to Korea yet. And that means that a lot of Korean foods looked very different back then. 

Ji Hye Kim: The national dish of Korea that everybody hangs onto, like it's our bloodline, kimchi didn't look like what it looked like even a hundred years. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Right, right. 

Ji Hye Kim: Yeah. 

Sohla El-Waylly: So it was ... It was pale back then.

Ji Hye Kim: Yeah, it was pale for a long time. And then chili flakes gets incorporated in there. And then also napa cabbage is Chinese vegetable. So there was like a large, large foreign bok choy, kind of a vegetable that we used, but it wasn't like Napa cabbage, like we do like these days.

Sohla El-Waylly: So the original kimchi was more of this bok choy fermented ... 

Ji Hye Kim: Yeah, I would say it's more akin to like a spiced sauerkraut that has ginger — lots of ginger and garlic than kimchi now.

Ham El-Waylly: I feel like you go to anyone, including Koreans, like, what's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of kimchi? And it's going to be the red Napa cabbage kimchi. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh. 

Ham El-Waylly: That's the standard kimchi banchan that you get on your table, really at any Korean restaurant that you go to. So it's really interesting to hear that it was not that old — it's not that old.

Sohla El-Waylly: And like, people defend these things so aggressively. But the fact is, like, all of these things are always changing. And it does worry me a little that we are going to end up in a place where we're stuck and afraid of evolving because we're trying so hard to preserve these things that actually have always been changing.

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: In 1910, everything changes again. Japan colonizes Korea, the royal courts come to an end, and Korea’s food supply takes a huge turn. The Japanese take over rice production in Korea, and import almost all of Korea’s rice to Japan. That means that there wasn’t enough rice to feed people in Korea, so Japan imports other grains into Korea. Koreans are forced to make tteokbokki with wheat instead of rice.

Sohla El-Waylly: In the 1960s, after the Japanese occupation and the Korean War, South Korea’s food system is in bad shape. The government wants to redevelop its rice supply, but to do that, it puts strict quotas on rice in Korea. Street vendors are expanding. More and more people need quick and filling food as they rebuild their country. And tteokbokki starts appearing in street carts. But it’s still being made with wheat, not rice. And in fact, that wheat tteokbokki was what Ji Hye ate as a kid.

Ji Hye Kim: It was less chewy than rice cakes. And it was soft, and the texture is like just comfort, itself, because it's slightly overcooked because it's been sitting in the vat for a while. It has a little chew to it, but it's mostly like pillowy, like gnocchi.

Sohla El-Waylly: And there’s another big change — gochujang, which is now popular in Korea, starts getting added to the recipe. There is, like, a rumor about how it happened that I absolutely do not believe. [LAUGHS] 

Ham El-Waylly: What's the rumor?

Ji Hye Kim: The person who claims that they originated the tteokbokki that you see these days as a street food with gochujang is a woman named Mabunzak. The story is that she had like a soy sauce based tteokbokki and then by accident it fell — like one of the piece fell into gochujang. And then when she tasted it, it was good. 

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] 

Ji Hye Kim: So she started making — [LAUGHS] yeah, she started making it.

Ham El-Waylly: And that sounds like nonsense.

Sohla El-Waylly: That sounds like nonsense. 

Ham El-Waylly: That's complete nonsense. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Absolute nonsense. 

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah. 

Sohla El-Waylly: It's just — it's like, there's so many stories like that where like, oh it just fell. 

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah. 

Sohla El-Waylly: But I mean, sure, it's a nice story. I could see the visual, the splash.

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. Gets it .... Gets it on her shirt. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah 

Ham El-Waylly: It's like, oh no, you stupid tteokbokki, look at what you've done to me. I'm gonna eat you as revenge.

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh.

Ham El-Waylly: And then you eat it, and then you get like the swelling music in the background, doves fly into the kitchen and surround her, and then it's her big moment.

Sohla El-Waylly: The Ratatouille moment.

Ham El-Waylly: Uh-huh.

[CLIP OF SWELLING MUSIC FROM RATATOUILLE]

Ham El-Waylly: I was thinking more Simply Irresistible.

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh, that's a good one.

Ham El-Waylly: That kind of ... 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah. 

[CLIP OF SWELLING MUSIC FROM SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE] 

 Ham El-Waylly: That kind of magic.

Sohla El-Waylly: Well, I mean, whether that's true or not, the gochujang adds a lot of flavor. So if you're going to take away all these expensive ingredients, like the beef and the mushrooms, gochujang is a cheap way to make it taste really good. And because street vendors needed to make this food ready to order, instead of the sauté, they braised. 

Ji Hye Kim: So then it becomes more like a soupy made in bulk, like scoop and scoop and serve kind of a dish.

Sohla El-Waylly: But in the late 1980s, tteokbokki changes again. There’s a rising sense of nationalism in the country, that Koreans should be eating food from Korea. There’s a movement to eat more rice, and tteokbokki switches, from wheat back to rice.

Ji Hye Kim: And then I remember the switch. I remember the rice cakes tasting differently in the, like, '88, '89, thinking like, this is not the one that I had a while ago. And sometimes Korean people can divide themselves into the wheat cakes people or the rice cakes people for tteokbokki.

Sohla El-Waylly: So there you have it. At long last, the recipe for tteokbokki is settled once and for all: rice cakes, gochujang. And it shall never change again, right? 

Ham El-Waylly: Really? 

Sohla El-Waylly: Wrong.

Ji Hye Kim: The first time I saw a different version of tteokbokki was when I went to Korea in about 10 years ago. And we went to a restaurant and they had tteokbokki but made with Italian sauces.

Sohla El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. 

Ji Hye Kim: So there was like a gorgonzola pasta version of tteokbokki. And then now one of the more popular variation of tteokbokki that's a modern invention is, they call it, "Rose tteokbokki. So it's basically gochujang cream sauce?

Ham El-Waylly: What does that mean?

Sohla El-Waylly: It's kind of like, uh — I like to think of it as, uh, penne alla vodka.

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] Oh!

Sohla El-Waylly: So it's like a gochujang sauce with cream in it. 

Ham El-Waylly: Okay. Okay. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Rosé.

Ham El-Waylly: So it's like their vodka sauce. 

Sohla El-Waylly: It's like their vodka sauce. Yeah.

Ham El-Waylly: That’s really funny. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah. You know, gochujang is so spicy and salty that like, mellowing out with cream sounds like perfect.

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. And it'll turn it ... It really ... It's really smooth too, so it'll incorporate into a sauce like that really well.

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Sohla El-Waylly: By the time Ji Hye finished all her research, her perception of her beloved tteokbokki was very different.

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Sohla El-Waylly: So as Ji Hye prepared to open her restaurant, she took all this research and knowledge and channeled it into her tteokbokki dishes. 

Ji Hye Kim: So first one is street style tteokbokki, so it's gochujang based.

Sohla El-Waylly: It has scallions, pork belly, and a slow cooked egg — so definitely a more modern version of street style tteokbokki.

Ji Hye Kim: And then, we have Royale style, which is more inspired by the older version. So it's pan fried with seasonal vegetables. And we get really beautiful, many different kind of mushrooms from a local mushroom company — so shiitake mushrooms or maitake or shi maji, mushrooms. 

Sohla El-Waylly: And just like in the royal court, this is soy-sauce based, no gochujang here.

Ji Hye Kim: And then the third one that we're gonna put on the menu is the most irreverent version of it. We're gonna deep fry the rice cake, so it's extra crispy on the outside. And then we're gonna toss it in miso and butter or tanjang and butter. And then we are gonna grate some Parmesan Reggiano on top, and then like a heavy dose of pepper. And it mimics flavors of cacio e peppe so much ...

Sohla El-Waylly: Mmm. Mm-hmm.

Ji Hye Kim: Because the fermented soybean paste brings the funk that pecorino Romano would've brought in.

Sohla El-Waylly: Mm-hmm.

Ji Hye Kim: So it's salty and peppery and very, very satisfying.

Sohla El-Waylly: It’s like Ji Hye is making a Zingerman’s but for Korean food, right at her restaurant. She’ll teach you about tteokbokki in all the different menu options, just like she taught customers about Parmigiano Reggiano. But what would the purists think?

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Sohla El-Waylly: So when Ji Hye opened Miss Kim, she was worried about the older generation, like, criticizing her takes on tteokbokki, but the feedback has been very surprising.

Ji Hye Kim: One of the parents who came for his daughter's law school graduation, like, called me out of the kitchen wanting to talk to me. So I was like, oh my God, he's gonna hate the food. And then I came out, he's like, "I wanted to meet you because I gave my daughter my credit card, and all I see is Ms. Kim, Ms. Kim, Ms. Kim, Ms. Kim on the statement. [LAUGHING] And I can see that your restaurant is not cheap. So I wanted to personally experience what she was using my money for And I really enjoyed it." And he's like, "It tastes really homemade, so I really like it."

Ham El-Waylly: And he’s probably thinking this is a street food, why are you paying so much for street food. Like she said she was using these special sourced mushrooms, these really delicious local seasonal ingredients. Those things are not cheap

Sohla El-Waylly: Well, our biggest pushback when we had a restaurant was complaints about the price. But everything was market, local, organic, made in house. We made our cheese.

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah.

Sohla El-Waylly: Who makes their cheese? [LAUGHS] We almost got a divorce because you were spending too much on french fry potatoes.

Ham El-Waylly: And lettuce.

Sohla El-Waylly: And lettuce. Oh my gosh, so much money on lettuce. But it is, it's like frustrating when people say that it's not cheap, because I don't think people understand what goes into the food that they're eating. 

Sohla El-Waylly: But so this dad wasn’t complaining about authenticity or whatever. And Ji Hye finds that the real complaints at her restaurant aren’t coming from people like him ...

Ji Hye Kim: The biggest pushback I get is usually from Korean-Americans in their thirties who either haven't traveled much or they have very strong nostalgia for the food that their mother or grandmother made for them when they were going to school in United States. And often the most common refrain is, "It doesn't taste like my mom's cooking."

Ham El-Waylly: I am not surprised that most of the pushback is coming from Korean Americans in their 30s. A lot of people who grow up eating one type of food assume that that is the only way to make it, cause they haven't experienced it enough where they've tried different varieties. Cuisine isn't static. Like, as, this has shown us.

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh.

Ham El-Waylly: Tteokbokki has changed so many, in so many different ways over time, and they're all still tteokbokki. 

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Sohla El-Waylly: Okay, so I'm really excited now that I have this license to be free with tteokbokki. So I'm going to make cacio e pepe tteokbokki in our kitchen.

Ham El-Waylly: That's exciting.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, we're gonna go Italian. That’s after the break.

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+++BREAK+++

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Ham El-Waylly: I’m Ham.

Sohla El-Waylly: And I’m Sohla. Welcome back to Deep Dish, our collaboration with our friends at The Sporkful podcast, while you’re here, check out their show!

Ham El-Waylly: If I could sum up The Sporkful, I would say it's fun food stories, food interviews told by usually people who know what they're talking about. It's not for foodies. 

Sohla El-Waylly: It's for eaters. And if you’re looking for a Sporkful episode to start with, check out Dan’s interview with Aubrey Gordon, the co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase. It’s an episode all about the fat liberation movement and debunking diet culture. It’s a great conversation, Aubrey is super smart and hilarious. That one came out just a couple weeks ago, so find it wherever you’re listening to this one!

Ham El-Waylly: Okay, let’s get back to the show. Sohla, what are you making for us?

Sohla El-Waylly: So I'm going to do cacio e pepe tteokbokki, which is a way that we do eat it a lot. So I already, defrosted and like gave it a quick boil. And then I tossed it in some olive oil ... 

[GAS BURNER TURNING ON] 

Sohla El-Waylly: And now I'm gonna pop it in a non-stick skillet and crisp it up ... 

[CRISPING TTEOBOKKI] 

Sohla El-Waylly: I'm gonna give it a sauté first, cause I love getting the outside a little bit crunchy. And, as we learned, boki means sauté. I'm just going to toss it around a little in this olive oil and it's going to get a little blistery and a little brown.

[CRISPING TTEOBOKKI] 

Sohla El-Waylly: Like, I just have it all in a pan, because when I just want to eat.

Ham El-Waylly: On top of each other.

Sohla El-Waylly: Well, it's in, like, roughly one layer ... 

Ham El-Waylly: Is it?

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, I'd say so. But like, when Ham does it, he puts one at a time, turns it with tweezers, gets like perfect 365 degrees of, like, crunch, but then you end up with like six pieces after 20 minutes.

Ham El-Waylly: Not if we use a bigger pan?

Sohla El-Waylly: This is the biggest nonstick skillet we have.

Ham El-Waylly: And it looks like that corner is three layers.

Sohla El-Waylly: What are you ...

Ham El-Waylly: Three layers high.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] Get out of here. Stop trying to make me sound bad. 

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: In general, when it comes to like snacks, Ham is like way more intense than me and I just wanna get to the snack faster.

Ham El-Waylly: I don't see the point in having a bad snack. I'd rather not snack than have a bad snack. Oh, you're starting to see some color on them and they ... as they crisp they kind of puff up along the edges, too. 

Sohla El-Waylly: And you can hear it, it sounds drier and they're kind of like ... 

Ham El-Waylly: Scraping.

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh huh. So now, we sauce. So I ... I forgot to save my pasta water, so we're just using water, and it's going to be fine. So I'm turning down the heat. So now that I have like a nice little bit of browning, I'm gonna turn the heat down to low, and I'm gonna add a lot of pepper, cause you wanna toast that pepper a little bit — kind of a coarse grind. 

[GRINDING FRESH PEPPER] 

Sohla El-Waylly: And as soon as it hits that pan, that little bit of dried heat ... whoo, it gets spicy. It's kind of crazy, like pepper is a pretty common ingredient, but it's very complex depending on how you use it. Okay, that's clearly toasty. [COUGHS] Now I'm going to add some water. Now that I've added the water, those little bits of rice cakes that were sticking aren't sticking. And, like, basically we're making, like, a beurre monte, which is when you just emulsify butter into water. And it's, like, the basis for a lot of sauces. I'm gonna add a bunch of grated parm and then a couple knobs of butter, and we're gonna stir. And it's gonna get creamy, and if it doesn't look creamy, maybe you need a splash more water. A lot of times, if your sauce doesn't look right, the answer is just more water. You want gentle bubblage. And it's like already super creamy.

Ham El-Waylly: Wow. And no pasta water needed.

Sohla El-Waylly: No pasta water needed! I mean, it's nice to use the pasta water, but the fact is it's like really gonna be fine. 

[GRATING CHEESE] 

Sohla El-Waylly: Actually, more important than your pasta water is how you grate your cheese. That's something no one talks about enough. You need to make sure you grate your cheese on the small side of a box grater. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I love a microplane, but it's too fine and it clumps. Like it should be the texture of the stuff that comes in the can. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Wow, that looks ...

Ham El-Waylly: That looks great. 

Sohla El-Waylly: That looks super glossy, creamy, emulsified. Okay, we're gonna taste. Such a quick snack. 

Ham El-Waylly: So quick.

Sohla El-Waylly: It's quick. You can make things quickly.

[SOUNDS OF PLATING A DISH] 

Sohla El-Waylly: Wow, it's super glossy.

Ham El-Waylly: So saucy.

Sohla El-Waylly: So cheesy. Should we taste? 

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah, let's taste. Mm. It's really good.

Sohla El-Waylly: Mm hmm. 

Ham El-Waylly: It's really cheesy.

Sohla El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. 

Ham El-Waylly: The sauce is perfectly emulsified. It coats the tteokbokki beautifully and you can't beat that chew.

Sohla El-Waylly: What I really like about this is that the flavor of the cheese combined with the texture of the tteokbokki, you feel like you're just eating sticks of cheese. [LAUGHS] You know what I mean? 

Ham El-Waylly: Like mozzarella sticks?

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, yeah. [LAUGHS] 

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Sohla El-Waylly: Talking with Ji Hye gave me a new appreciation for tteokbokki, and got me excited about where it might go next.

Ji Hye Kim: Thinking about the dish and changing it slowly and being thoughtful about it has always been part of the tradition. And I think there is a responsibility attached to that. You have to understand the story of that dish and you cannot understand the story of that dish if you don't understand the story of the people who are cooking and eating that dish. Learning that tteokbokki is — has always been changing and evolving, learning that was just so liberating. So it feels liberating. [LAUGHING] 

Sohla El-Waylly: Is your mom still around? Has she had your tteokbokki?

Ji Hye Kim: Yeah, she says it's okay. [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: She says it's okay? Even with all these vegetables?

Ji Hye Kim: She will never, ever admit that anybody else is better cooking Korean food.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] Oh wow.

Ham El-Waylly: It's on brand.

Sohla El-Waylly: I think saying that it's okay is like high praise. 

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah, yeah. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Right?

Ham El-Waylly: With a straight face and no smile.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, yeah. That's as good as it gets.

Ham El-Waylly: That's high praise.

Sohla El-Waylly: I don't even know if I've gotten an okay yet. 

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] 

Sohla El-Waylly: Have you gotten an okay from your dad?

Ham El-Waylly: I think I've gotten an okay.

Sohla El-Waylly: Wow. Yeah. [LAUGHS] 

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Sohla El-Waylly: Thanks so much to Ji Hye Kim. If you’re in Ann Arbor, go check out the restaurant Miss Kim! If you want the recipe for my cacio e pepe tteokbokki ... [LAUGHS] we’ll be posting that on Instagram, I’m @SohlaE.

Ham El-Waylly: and I’m @Hamegram. You can find The Sporkful on Instagram @TheSporkful. We’ll be back in two weeks with another episode of Deep Dish, right here in The Sporkful feed. And if you missed our first episode, it starts off with two dead bodies and a trunk full of tamales — you don’t want to miss it. 

Sohla El-Waylly: That kind of sounds like a band. 

Ham El-Waylly: A band or like a Cohen brothers movies. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Two dead bodies and a trunk full of tamales. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. Right. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Coming to a theater near you. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. It’s in our feed right now. You can also check out some recent Sporkful episodes, including Dan’s conversation with Aubrey Gordon.

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