032: Gyeran Bap and its many variations

And on being a culinary tourist from home

From the top I would like to thank Kate Jinx and Brodie Lancaster, the hosts of the excellent and addictive podcast, See Also. Kate recommended Home Cooking Diary in a recent episode, bringing over quite a lot of new readers. If you’re new here, Welcome! Thanks to Kate’s kind words, I’m feeling encouraged in this project and ever so grateful that people are enjoying my writing.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend listening to See Also. One my favorite episodes is actually episode 1, “Hogg’s Breath,” for its discussion of the films of Joanna Hogg (I am also a Hogg Head). And more recently, there’s a great segment on All the Beauty and the Bloodshed in ep 45: State Secrets. Bonus: if you are as obsessed with Australia and Australians as I am, this is the podcast for you.

---

Eric Kim’s Gyeran Bap with boiled sweet potato and roasted seaweed

One of my greatest cooking-related joys of the past couple years has been learning a bit about South Korean-style home cooking, thanks to the wonderful work of recipe developer and cookbook author Eric Kim, and YouTube cooking phenom Maagnchi. Kim’s column for the New York Times is so enjoyable (and unmissable by me) for how he writes about cooking from his childhood memories of food, and how he brings that cooking into his work today.

The recipe of his I make most often is Gyeran Bap, a dish he wrote about in 2021:

Many cultures have some variation of egg rice. It’s one of those dishes that you don’t really talk about because it’s so basic: fried eggs, white rice and something for seasoning. In South Korea, it’s called gyeran bap, which translates to “egg rice,” featuring soy sauce, sesame oil and often a touch of butter.

Gyeran bap with Fly By Jing’s Zhong Sauce on top

If memory serves, I made it the same day I read his piece. Fluffy white rice topped with an egg fried in soy sauce and sesame oil, and garnished with gim (roasted seaweed): it was irrestistible, not only for what was in the dish but because it sounded like the most comforting, filling and sustaining meal. The savory saltiness of soy sauce and nuttiness of toasted sesame oil, combined with the hearty blank slate of white rice, and the fortifying properties of a single egg. It’s a perfect dish.

The more I explore cooking the more interested I am in the meals and snacks that don’t always make it into cookbooks or onto restaurant menus. I by no means feel that I’m well-read enough in cookbooks (let alone multiculturally), to speak definitively on the topic, but to Eric’s point, this type of “basic” dish doesn’t feel typical to those you might read about in a cookbook.

In the piece he brings in the perspective of someone who ate this dish in a Vietnamese household. Instead of sesame oil and soy sauce, her version was seasoned with Maggi sauce. I hear a detail like that and I wish I could come to know all of the versions, and it makes me think about all of the home cooked meals I’ll never know about—because home cooking isn’t universal. Without reading this personal story, I might not know the pleasure of gyeran bap.

Kimchi Fried Rice

It’s near impossible to truly know a cuisine that is not your own, and I’ve been mulling this over a lot having read Alicia Kennedy’s series on Culinary Tourism for her newsletter. At its most obvious being a culinary tourist can include experiencing the cuisine of another culture while traveling, or dining at restaurants to learn about the cuisine of another culture, but as any reader of cookbooks and culinary literature knows, it can be done at home too. It’s a limited pursuit, even if we seek out as much authenticity as we can when we travel or read. Restaurants give us a limited scope, and how often do we have the opportunity to eat with locals while traveling in farflung places, without connections. I could make the same argument about cookbooks. I wonder how many cookbooks originating in other languages are translated into English, and by that same logic, how many indigenous recipe authors from other countries are published in America. I would guess not many.

Kim is a first generation Korean American, so his work reflects the beautiful meld between American and Korean cuisines, creating a cuisine all its own. One of the things I appreciate about his cookbook is the American spin on South Korean dishes, and vice versa. His version of breaded chicken is served alongside vinegary sweet grated cabbage. His vegetable dishes are slathered in gochjang. There is a chapter devoted to kimchi, but also a recipe for California Pizza Kitchen-style sheet pan pizza and Jalapeño-marinated chicken tacos with watermelon tossed in sesame oil and fish sauce.

Gyeran bap in progress

Korean American is dedicated to his mom, Jean, and her recipes are found throughout the book, alongside stories of their relationship and making the book together, and sometimes you get Eric’s version alongside Jean’s. It’s fun to see the spin the younger generation puts on the elder’s dish. Reading it, I learn about how a Korean woman makes kimchi, and how she applies her native methods to her homemaking in America. It’s such a unique and personal and meaningful way of constructing a cookbook.

---

For a very long time I rarely made rice because invariably, it wouldn’t turn out. It would stick to the bottom of the pot and burn. It would never be fluffy. But then I was enlightened by Kim’s “Perfect White Rice” receipe for the stovetop. I’m guessing I first used it as part of a NYT recipe, but it appears in Korean American too. Thanks to this recipe I‘m pretty confident I won’t fuck up rice again.

Now that I have cooked rice* on hand more often, we’ve been making a lot of Gyeran Bap, and today for lunch Tycho and I had a version of Kim’s Tuna Mayo Rice Bowl, which is another one of my go-tos. And Kimchi Fried Rice has been a staple as well, made from my kimchi, via Maangchi’s YouTube video and recipe for Easy Kimchi.

Tomato Egg Risotto

What I love most about Gyeran Bap is its many personal versions. It lends itself to an infinite number of applications, like the time I used leftover tomato risotto as a base, fried the eggs in olive oil, and finished it with black pepper and chili flakes. I realized I had made Italian style egg rice. Next time I’ll also add oregano, and maybe some garlicky sautéed greens.

xo AV

*I leave my cooked rice on the stove in the pot, rather than refridgerating it. It will be fine for a few days as long as your home isn’t overly warm. The cold of the fridge makes it pretty strange and difficult to warm up (especially if you don’t have a microwave).

---

No recommendations this week! I haven’t had any time to read or watch anything I haven’t already talked about here (just consuming my favorite newsletters and podcasts, and Succession and Columbo, obvs), and I’m not spending any money these days (tragically), so admittedly my non-cooking recs are lacking. Instead I’d like to mention the best thing I’ve made over the past week:

Mina Stone’s Roasted Vegetables with Italian Sausage from Lemon, Love, and Olive Oil—which I can already tell is going to become my new go-to whenever I don’t know what to cook. It’s a very simple sheet pan meal of whatever vegetables you have, with the sausage nestled in—oregano and olive oil sprinkled all over everything—roasted on 400 F for like 30 minutes, plus another 10 minutes if you want to add greens toward the end. This can be made vegetarian easily by subbing firm or extra firm tofu for the sausage (maybe marinated in something ahead of time, like Bragg’s Aminos or Soy Sauce or Tamari)—though cooking time of the tofu might need adjusting—or just the veggies by themselves. We had it the other night with broccoli, zucchini, sweet potato, potato, yellow onion, and dandelion greens. It truly rocked.