Learn to Cook the Korean Way in 15 Minutes

The cloudy water you rinse off your rice and pour away is treated as stock in a Korean kitchen, not as waste. It holds the first of six habits that make sense of instructions in Korean recipes that otherwise look like mistakes: a strip of kelp pulled out of a broth before it tastes of anything, a cucumber salted and left alone before it is dressed, toasted sesame oil saved for the very end instead of the pan. This video walks through those six habits from an ordinary Korean kitchen, in the order they actually happen on the stove: saving rice-rinsing water for a soybean paste soup, building an anchovy and kelp broth and lifting the kelp out early, rinsing and soaking rice before it ever meets heat, salting a cucumber to draw water out rather than to season it, finishing a dish with toasted sesame oil only once the heat is off, and the habit of a cook's own hand, called son-mat in Korean. None of it needs a trip to a Korean grocery store, and most of the pots involved sit and do their own work while the cook is somewhere else in the kitchen, which is how a full Korean home meal, rice, soup and two side dishes, comes together in about 30 minutes. Every amount and every time mentioned in the video is written out below, so you can keep it by the stove instead of in your memory. Rice water (ssalddeummul): save the cloudy water left over from rinsing rice, and use it in place of plain water in a soybean paste soup. Anchovy and kelp broth: dried anchovies and a piece of dried kelp, dashima, go into cold water. Lift the kelp out early, before it turns slimy, and keep the finished broth refrigerated for 3 to 4 days. Rice: rinse several times, soak 30 minutes before cooking, use roughly equal parts rice and water, and let it rest off the heat with the lid on once it is done. Cucumber and other vegetables: salt and let stand, roughly half an hour for a soft vegetable like a tomato and an hour or longer for a crunchy one like cabbage, then drain the liquid off without squeezing. Spinach side dish, namul: blanch in boiling water for 20 to 30 seconds, drain and gently squeeze, then season with soy sauce, garlic, sugar and sesame seeds, adding the sesame oil last, off the heat, mixed in by hand.