Korean Recipes & Food Ideas

Korean food is an ideal starter cuisine for the beginner home cook. It delivers complex favors, but often with a more simple preparation than you might think.

Every bite is hot, gooey, and ultra-crispy.

It’s spicy, crunchy, delightfully salty, and perfect with a bowl of warm rice.

I love the fall. The weather is getting cooler, my slow cooker happily takes its semi-permanent place on my kitchen counter while my oven always seems to be occupied roasting something. There are a handful of comfort food dishes that I crave in fall, and this Korean Curry Rice is one of them. This mild dish uses beef short ribs, and it is cooked with carrots, potatoes, and serve over white rice. As a kid, I have fond memories of walking into our kitchen and smelling curry simmering on the stove.

Here's how to make a delicious, one-pan, ​bulgogi-style rice bowl on a busy weeknight.

It's the perfect combo of sweet, savory, and toasty.

It’s fatty, spicy, savory, and full of flavor.

It’s infinitely customizable.

Taking a cue from Korean bo ssam, it will be met with all the oohs and aahs.

You may want to double up the sauce.

Serving up comfort and convenience in one bowl.

Classic Korean with an Italian twist.

The addition of yuzu kosho makes every bowl bright, bold, and punchy.

One slurp is all you need to fall in love with these noodles.

These Korean soy sauce braised short ribs are a triple threat: super unctuous, savory, and sweet, all at the same time.

Inspired by the Korean banchan gamja bokkeum.

The Korean Vegan's cookies will be the highlight of the holiday.

It's my definition of comfort food.

It's a dish that connects my Mexican heritage with Korean culinary tradition.

It's a recipe everyone should know.

Savory, then sweet — as if a butterscotch blondie and a salted chocolate chip cookie got together and then added doenjang, a Korean soybean paste, to the party.

This recipe reflects his Korean roots, his American upbringing, and the Chinese food he’s cooked professionally in San Francisco.

This flaky biscuit blanket is more like a cashmere throw for thick-cut pieces of caramelized SPAM.

Crispy, crunchy, salty, sweet, and chewy! What more could you ask for?

A plant-based, DIY version of the classic Japanese snack.

Scoop it up with tortilla chips or crackers, or eat it straight from the pan.

The upgrade your breakfast has been missing.

Just add rice and you've got perfection.

A soulful twist on a Seoul staple.

The squidgy rice cakes and springy noodles are perfect proof that two carbs are better than one.

Ramen noodles are tossed with Spam and spinach, then cooked omelet-style until the noodles are crispy.

If I see potatoes on a breakfast menu, I’m probably going to order them. My favorite potato dish is diner-style hash browns done properly, all shredded and crisped up on a griddle until golden-brown on the outside and fluffy on the inside. But do you know what tops diner-style hash browns? Adding kimchi to the mix. This unexpected combination is so good I almost ate the entire pan in one sitting.

Each plush and fluffy roll is filled with kimchi compound butter.

Around the World in 30 Soups: This month we’re collaborating with chefs, cookbook authors, and our own Kitchn crew to share a globetrotting adventure in soups from countries and cuisines around the world. Today’s stop: Korea. If you haven’t yet been introduced to the power couple of Rejina Pyo and Jordan Bourke and their stylish Korean cooking, you are in for a treat.

Zucchini bread, zucchini chips, zucchini, zucchini, zucchini. Our goal this week has been to give you a few fresh ideas for this most ubiquitous of summer squash, recipes to wake you up instead of making you hit the snooze button one more time. This stir-fry from Michael Natkin of Herbivoracious is exactly what you need: it’s fast, needs only five ingredients, and has a spicy kick.

When you hear “pancakes for dinner,” you probably don’t think of bindaettuck, the traditional Korean mung bean pancakes. But while they may require ingredients you haven’t used before, they’re just as quick and easy to make. At Revel in Seattle, chef Rachel Yang offers ever-changing twists on tradition, from sweet corn pancakes (crusted with corn flakes, natch) in the summer to everything bagel-spiced pancakes with whitefish in the winter.

It's called budae jjigae, or Korean army stew, and it's pure comfort in a bowl.

The easiest way to bring restaurant-style bulgogi (Korean BBQ beef) to your own dinner table? These three-ingredient slow cooker tacos — which aren’t authentic, of course, but will deliver the sweet, savory, and spicy flavors you expect from Korean BBQ. All you need is flank steak, barbecue sauce, and gochujang — which we like to think of as the spicy miso of Korean cooking.

Flank steak is my absolute favorite cut of steak for weeknights. It’s quick-cooking, and the most budget-friendly steak I know. Plus, you can cook it a number of different ways, and make a ton of different dinner options out of this one single cut. While this particular marinade is inspired by Korean bulgogi, it acts as a basic framework that can be adapted to a variety of flavor profiles.

Fusion foods are created when ingredients, flavors, or a technique from one cuisine combine with those of another. I like to call these kinds of dishes “When Harry Met Sally” recipes. These recipes are born when you think two different things can’t possibly be friends because something will inevitably get in the way. But those two flavors keep bumping into each other (sometimes in your dreams) because — despite their differences — it’s just meant to be.

Hot off the grill, this spicy Korean chicken will not disappoint. Using chicken drumsticks and chicken thigh meat doused in a spicy, flavorful marinade, this grilled chicken needs to make an appearance on your dinner table soon! The summer is in full swing and I’m loving every minute of it.

Bulgogi is a beloved Korean dish of spicy grilled beef, and one of the first Korean dishes I tried — and loved. My homemade version here is an easy, weeknight riff on the classic dish. It’s become one of my husband’s very favorite, please-make-this-at-least-once-a-week meals. And that’s cool, because it’s a breeze to throw together, especially if you use a couple of my favorite weeknight shortcuts.

When Seattle chef duo Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi debated what angle to take on their third restaurant, Trove, they couldn’t ignore what their customers wanted: Korean barbecue. Per usual, though, they didn’t want to make it strictly traditional — which is how Trove became known as the Korean-ish place where you take friends to grill lemongrass-smothered tri-tip, tamarind-tinged duck breast, or za’atar-crusted pork belly on a Korean-style tabletop grill.

Bulgolgi, or Korean-style gilled beef, has a way of making people fall in love with it after the first bite. Thinly sliced beef seasoned with a mixture of savory-sweet flavors and cooked until incredibly tender will do that to you. In this recipe, we’re taking all the key flavor elements of bulgogi and bringing them to your weeknight kitchen. It all starts with an ingenious, make-ahead marinade, made with a surprise ingredient of pears, to both season and tenderize affordable flank steak.

Rachel Yang, the James Beard Award-nominated chef behind Seattle’s Joule, Revel, and Trove restaurants, and Portland, Oregon’s Revelry, is a force. Her food— undeniably Korean at its roots, unabashedly creative in practice — combines noodles, dumplings, barbecue, and hot pots with flavors from all over the globe.