Finally – we get a cookbook that gives banchan a rightful place to shine in the spotlight.
Caroline Choe’s cookbook, Banchan: 60 Korean American Recipes for Delicious Sharable Sides, is roughly 200 pages of artistic inspiration and instruction dedicated to preparing those little dishes that come out to the table at Korean restaurants before the main course.
You know the ones – the different kinds of kimchi, the garlicky and chivey vegetables, the healthy-sized dollop of potato salad with bits of crunchy veggies, the fish cakes stir fried with onions and gochujung.
Banchan is a feast for your eyes, taste buds and stomach. It’s a kaleidoscope of colors and textures. Each separate flavor bomb is served in its own tiny bowl. After all the bowls are on the table, you and your fellow eaters typically find yourselves pushing the dishes around and amidst one another as you share and devour, picking into the contents of each dish with your personal set of chopsticks. In other words, banchan is a communal eating experience.
Choe’s cookbook, Banchan, out October 2024, is a unique and welcomed addition to the repertoire of recent Korean cookbooks hitting the market left and right. It is the first one written for the United States that focuses entirely on banchan recipes. Other cookbooks will give banchan its own section, but Choe is here to give these dishes, often taken for granted, the possibility of coming together to be a main course.
Helen Cho, a showrunner and filmmaker for a number of travel documentary series including Take Out with Lisa Ling, as well as Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, provides the book’s foreword.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my travels in search of lesser-told stories, it’s that the real magic often happens away from the spotlight,” Cho writes. “It’s fitting, then, that Caroline, unwavering in her desire to bring others center stage, decided to make her debut cookbook about banchan, an array of side dishes with a constant supportive but often overlooked presence at any kitchen dining table.”
Choe’s artistry spans across mediums. She’s a writer, a teacher, a performer, she’s self-created a series of videos called Create and Plate, in which she explores the food, places and people in her life that inspire her. The videos have a charmingly personal and DIY feel to them. Nothing slick or over-produced, just an engaging glimpse through an artist’s personal lens.
Banchan almost didn’t happen for Choe or for us. Choe told The Korea Society in an October 2024 interview that she’d been in the landing-an-agent game for 12 years, and was burnt out on the process. She was quitting, for the third time.
She was hanging out with her family after she’d finalized this major life decision when her friend Jasmine Cho, a baking activist, called her. CALLED, Choe said. “No one calls anymore, so I picked up.”
Jasmine said her agent wanted to meet with Choe about a cookbook project. Choe admitted she was burnt out and had quit, but her friend talked her into just taking the meeting with the agent and an editor at Chronicle, the publisher. She did, and they presented to her the prospect of writing a Korean cookbook about banchan.
“I can’t give you a Korean cookbook, but I can give you a Korean American one,” she’d said.
She explained to them at the meeting, based on the research she’d done, that the majority of Korean cookbooks on the market right now have the same traditional recipes in them.
“There are just ways that we’re preparing food in our generation and being in America with the resources we have that I’m hoping to introduce something new,” she said in her interview with The Korea Society.
That American part in Korean American, she said, meant, “The voice would come from me, and not from a white guy who went to Korea once and says, ‘Ooo, look what I discovered!’”
The cookbook is split into two main sections. Part 1 is Banchan Classics, the traditional ones, the OGs, so to speak. And Part 2 is Banchan from My Kitchen. And this is where Choe flexes her culinary creativity.
Creamy kimchi bacon dip, anyone? How about hot honey crispy tofu or pa muchim (green onion salad) pizza? Wait till you get to the smoky gochujung chicken salad recipe, the cheesy corn, the maple doenjang dipping sauce.
But don’t call these recipes “fusion,” Choe says in the cookbook. “We don’t use that dreaded F-word in my kitchen: fusion. All food is authentically its own entity.”
You’re in good hands with Choe no matter your level of banchan prep. We’re all fortunate she took that meeting with the agent and editor.
Caroline Choe shows us that the banchan experience is no longer the complimentary warm up you take for granted. It’s the life of the party.
Caroline Choe is in Seattle in October. She will be at mam’s books on October 20 at 5:00 PM, at Elliott Bay Bookstore on October 21 at 7:00 PM and at Book Larder on October 22 from 6:30 – 8:00 PM.
