K-BAP the Fourth

           Hello, my K-BAP followers. It’s good to see you again. Thank you so much for your continuous following. I know you have waited for this time for every week. This is the fourth story about K-BAP. In the last K-BAP post, the story about specific explanations of the regional difference of Korean foods was treated. Even this fourth K-BAP post has no relationship with the third one, I strongly recommend you to read the last K-BAP story. The 4^th K-BAP story is about Korean paste sauce, Gochu-jang.

           If you have ever tried spicy Korean foods, you have already tried the Gochu-jang. Gochu-jang is one of the typical Korean sauces. This sauce is being used to cook most of spicy Korean foods. I do use this sauce when I cook some spicy Korean foods. Therefore, this sauce would be listed a lot as one of the ingredient for future K-recipe posts. As stated above, there are some typical Korean sauces including Gochu-jang, Doen-jang, Gan-jang and other sauces. Because of the geographical distance, some of them are also being used in other East Asian countries like China and Japan. However, different from other sauces, Gochu-jang is very unique sauce. It can be found only in Korean food culture. Now, you might wonder what Gochu-jang is. In literal explanation, ‘gochu’ is Korean word for red pepper and ‘jang’ refers to paste sauce. Namely, Gochu-jang is Korean spicy paste made from red pepper, malt powder, glutinous rice, fermented soybean, salt and sugar. I know how to make Gyeong-sang province(if you click this, you can see what this province is) version of this sauce. However, getting those ingredients and cooking utensils is very hard in this country. Thus, I would not post recipe for Gochu-jang. If you really want to see how it is made, follow this hyperlink. You can see the original process to make it.

           There is a Korean proverb saying “If you try Gochu-jang of any family, you can find out how the dishes of that house tastes like”. As the proverb says, Gochu-jang means a lot in Korea. Thus, trying Gochu-jang means that you already tried Korean culture a lot. I strongly recommend you to buy one from on-line shop like Amazon or from the nearest Korean food shop. If you have Gochu-jang, you can cook more than 100 kinds of Korean dishes without other typical sauces. Thank you!!

- S.Choi -