Junghyun "JP" Park: How to Eat Korean Food
Junghyun "JP" Park: How to Eat Korean Food
Plus: JP's kimchi mandu, how discoveries happen, and FOOTBALL
Food with Mark Bittman: Junghyun “JP” Park
I’m personally so thrilled to have JP Park with us on Food this week. He’s the chef at a number of NYC restaurants now — notably Atoboy and Naro — and his food is really special. So when I found out that he was coming out with a book — called, simply, The Korean Cookbook, and cowritten with the culinary researcher and longtime friend of JP’s, Jungyoon Choi, I couldn’t wait to see it.
I said this to JP: I feel like I’ve been waiting for a cookbook like this one for a really long time—a comprehensive Korean cookbook that leaves no stone unturned. With this book you’ll learn all about rice (bap), about the abundant vegetables of Korea, about banchan and how best to eat it—do you know how wonderful it is to get a big bowl of rice and put your choice of banchan and condiments in there? As JP told me, it’s like your own personal bibimbap. Heaven. (Yes, I love Korean food.)
JP was born and raised in Korea; he’s worked in England and Australia and France, and was once interested in and was cooking French food—but, lucky for us, he decided that he wanted to go back to his roots, to hansik, which is Korean cuisine. His love of his food is infectious. You’ll see—here he is, with me and Kate, and you can find his recipes for Napa Cabbage Kimchi and Kimchi Mandu here.
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This Week’s Marksisms
How Do Discoveries Happen?
Nothing from me about cooking this week, but here’s a great piece from Experimental History (I don’t know how I found this, but likely from our friends at The Browser that wonders, in a friendly and non-academic way, how scientific discoveries “happen.” Do you know how things dry? How a toilet works? How to figure out the volume of this shape?
As a homeowner, I think I can answer the first question adequately; I can make a stab at the second based on my lingering high school physics knowledge; and I have no clue about the third, having gotten a D- in trig, if it even is trig that you need for that answer.