A Wave of Korean Cookbooks for Fall
new Korean cookbooks reflect a cuisine in motion
For years, Korean cuisine has occupied a modest corner of the cookbook shelf; this fall, it commands an entire season. The moment has been decades in the making: the global rise of K-pop, K-dramas, and Korean film has fueled widespread curiosity about Korean food, while South Korea’s growing economic and cultural influence has transformed the country’s exports into objects of aspiration.
The current wave also represents the culmination of years of work by Korean and diaspora chefs, writers, and recipe developers who have steadily expanded the conversation around Korean cooking. PW spoke with several of them about their forthcoming books.
Specialty menus
Graphic novelist Robin Ha’s first recipe collection, 2016’s Cook Korean!, is a strong seller in the category, with print unit sales to date topping 55,000, per BookScan. Her second is part of a cohort of titles that go deep into a single ingredient, technique, or tradition in Korean cuisine: Instant Noodles and Beyond (Harvest, Aug.) expands on a self-published zine and aims to broaden readers’ ideas about the humble convenience food.
Ha, who was born in South Korea, grew up eating ramyeon several times a week and recalls it as the first food she ever prepared by herself. She transforms Korean ramyeon into tuna melt ramyeon, pho, and vegan bulgogi ramyeon, and shares unexpected ideas: dry noodles can be crumbled into “popcorn” kernels (use the flavor packet for seasoning) while boiled, pan-fried noodles form the “bread” in a ramyeon mortadella sandwich. “Instant noodles are a base for all kinds of food, and you can be really creative with them,” she says, adding that the book’s international scope matches Korean cuisine’s growing global visibility. “We definitely have a distinct flavor, but it also plays well with different flavors from all over the world.”
Korean Soups (Workman, Oct.) by Clara Lee and Eddo Kim spotlights a fundamental pillar of the country’s cuisine. Recipes are organized by four broad themes—time and temperature, seasons, community, and healing—with soup serving as a gateway into Korean culture and family life. Yuk gye jang, or spicy shredded beef brisket soup, is traditionally made in large batches for family and friends who come to pay their respects at funerals; kimchi kongnamul guk (kimchi and soybean sprout soup) is a time-tested hangover cure.
Lee and Kim cofounded Queens, a line of Korean seasonings and other pantry items using produce sourced from California farms. They bring a Bay Area slow-food ethos to their book. “There’s a lot of ‘instant’ Korean food now—your tteokbokki and your instant noodles,” Kim notes. By contrast, “there’s a recipe in our book that takes almost a full day to make. Korean food is deeply rooted in fermentation and agrarian rhythms. I hope our book resonates with people who can connect with that.”
In Korean Cocktails (Countryman, Oct.), mixologist Haera Shin translates years behind the bars at the Tao and Momofuku restaurant groups into an exploration of Korean flavors, pantry staples, and traditional spirits. Her soy sauce old-fashioned became the project’s touchstone; it reveals how fermented ingredients can “amplify what you’re already
tasting,” she says. “I created a simple syrup with tamari and demerara sugar. The alchemy that happened was akin to a salted caramel or a brûlée-like flavor, with deep umami notes. It took off like wildfire.”
Recipes from Shin’s repertoire showcase Korean ingredients in new ways: a Manhattan riff featuring toasted sesame oil–washed rye; the “K-margarita,” which uses Korean chile pepper–infused tequila; and a savory martini flavored with a regional variety of seaweed.
Beyond the potent potables and zero-proof beverages, some 75 concoctions in all, Shin celebrates traditional Korean alcohols, like premium soju and makgeolli, and highlights the country’s rapidly evolving cocktail culture. “My peers are building these incredible bar programs and creating the first wave of modern day Korean cocktails in Korea,” she says. “No longer is Korea just a place where you go to a drinking house and pour shots of soju. You can saddle up to a beautiful bar and have a complex and innovative cocktail—that didn’t exist even 10 years ago.”
Home and away
Other books reinforce the ways Korean cuisine is enjoyed in its native country and how the diaspora community is sustaining it abroad.
Ae Jin Huys profiles 26 Korean chefs, Buddhist monks, food purveyors, and home cooks in From the Heart (Prestel, Sept.). The author, who was born in South Korea and adopted into a Belgian family, runs Mokja, a Korean food catering company in Ghent. As she traveled across South Korea researching her latest book, “What do people actually cook at home?” became its guiding question, she explains. In bustling Seoul, chocolatier Go Youngjoo finds comfort in patiently prepared mandu; in Jeollanam-do province, a coastal region famous for its seafood, cooking instructor Kim Sol opts for tofu and mushrooms rather than the traditional mudfish in chueotang, the way her mother prepared the soup for her as a child. “I really wanted to give the people I met a platform,” Huys says.
Themes of generosity and tradition recurred throughout the interviews, she notes. At the same time, she tried to capture a cuisine in transition, shaped by globalization, social media, and shifting eating habits. “I hope that it serves as a document of everyday traditions before they disappear, not only for the younger generation but also people outside of Korea.”
The Korean American grocery chain H Mart became familiar to many who’d never set foot inside one of its locations when Michelle Zauner name-checked it in the title of her bestselling 2021 memoir. Artisan publisher and editorial director Lia Ronnen sees the forthcoming H Mart (Oct.), written by company president Stacey Kwon, as less a branded cookbook than a cultural document. The book mirrors the experience of walking down a supermarket’s aisles, with chapters organized around produce, seafood, pantry staples, and prepared foods. Seventy-five recipes, such as myeongnan gyeran mari (rolled omelet with pollock roe) and cheesy kimchi fried rice, balance traditional Korean cooking with contemporary Korean American sensibilities. Info-rich sidebars invite readers to explore ingredients, techniques, and foodways.
Kwon’s father, H Mart CEO Il Yeon Kwon, opened the first store in 1982 to serve the needs of the Korean American community in Queens, Ronnen notes. “This is a book about how one family of immigrants built a business, Korean American food and culture writ large, and the expanding American palate.”
Our kitchens, ourselves
As Korean cuisine continues to reach wider audiences, recipe developer and regular NYT Cooking contributor Kay Chun sees the moment as one of shared discovery. “Cooking is kind of how I was able to find my identity,” she says. “It helped me realize that I don’t have to choose between my Korean heritage and American upbringing.”
The recipes in Chun’s debut cookbook, Gather Around My Table (Knopf, Oct.), are informed by the native New Yorker’s experience of the city’s multicultural food scene. “I was surrounded by all this different food and flavor,” she says, and that familiarity, along with her cultural background and culinary training, shaped the global pantry approach underpinning her cooking. Chun suggests ways to incorporate Korean flavors into everyday meals while building confidence in the kitchen, through dishes including fresh kimchi greens—“a great way to experience the vibrant flavor of kimchi without all the fermented pungency,” she says—and cacio e pepe–inspired creamy scallion and doenjang midnight pasta, whose ingredients include Korean fermented soybean paste.
Mei Liu and Kyong Han, the couple behind the popular Two Plaid Aprons platform, met in culinary school in Louisiana and conceived Fork + Chopsticks (DK, Nov.) as an homage to their respective Chinese and Korean heritages. Alongside traditional dishes and takeout favorites, the book features inventive mash-ups, such as burrata with gochujang bacon jam, shrimp and grits made with ginger and Shaoxing rice wine, and a roasted rice tiramisu that evokes scorched rice candy, a childhood favorite of Han’s. Throughout, the authors embrace shortcuts and ingredient swaps.
“Korean food might look intimidating when people see it for the first time, but flavor-wise, it’s approachable,” Han says. He remembers that as a kid, classmates called his food weird. Today, friends ask, “Do you make kimchi? Do you have kimchi? I really want to try kimchi!” he says. “Hearing that is really exciting.”
TV personality and New York restaurateur Esther Choi pays tribute to the grandmother who shaped her identity as a chef in Hand Taste (Voracious, Oct.), which draws on family recipes while reflecting Choi’s Korean American perspective and professional training. She credits her halmoni with inspiring the book’s title—the Korean concept of “hand taste,” or sohn-mat, is the intuitive touch a cook brings to a dish—as well as her approach to teaching. In addition to presenting recipes, Choi focuses on the techniques and impulses behind them, encouraging readers to “learn one thing about Korean food to take away from a recipe, whether it’s a seasoning, method, or ingredient,” she says. Traditional dishes such as japchae, jjigae, and miyeokguk sit alongside reinterpretations, including a roast chicken with sticky rice inspired by her grandmother’s Thanksgiving turkey.
Choi sees the current flourishing of Korean cookbooks as evidence that Korean culture is here to stay, and emphasizes that the moment is built on a commitment to celebrating, not guarding, that heritage. “We’re all helping each other and trying to push it forward,” she says. “You don’t want to be selfish about your culture—you want to share it.”
Pooja Makhijani is the author of books including Bread Is Love (Roaring Brook), illustrated by Lavanya Naidu.
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