Carolyn Stein is a senior studying communication and East Asian studies. She has previously written for The Stanford Daily, the Bay Area News Group, and Mission Local. In this guest post, Carolyn shares her experience at a cooking class taught by Chef Judy Joo, held at Stanford on April 12, 2024. The Korea Program hosted another cooking class on the same day, taught by actor and chef Ryu Soo-young.

If you had asked me prior to last week if I thought mac and cheese and kimchi would make a good combo, I would have shuddered at the thought. 

I could not have been more wrong.  

I was lucky enough to be one of a dozen Stanford students to take a cooking class from Korean-American entrepreneur, restauranteur, and chef Judy Joo on April 12. The cooking class was a follow-up to the “Korean Cuisine Gone Global” conference hosted the day before by the Korea program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. The first half of the conference consisted of a conversation on the future of Korean food studies with renowned professors Robert Ku, Jooyeon Rhee, and Rebecca Kinney. The second half of the conference consisted of a discussion on the globalization of Korean food with Joo and Korean celebrity actor and chef Ryu Soo-young.  

“So much of Korean food tells the history of Korea,” Joo said at the conference. “And we embrace all of it. Koreans still love to eat Budae Jjagae, Korean army stew, a dish where you don’t know if you’re getting a baked bean or a piece of spam.”  

As the owner of renowned Korean fried chicken restaurant Seoul Bird, Joo has made it her mission to not only share a taste of Korea with the world, but also to push the boundaries of what Korean food is.  

For the class, we were tasked with two dishes: kimchi mac ‘n cheese and salted caramel hotteok, Korean pancakes with a sweet filling. I shared a cooking station with another student. When I realized we had to make our hotteok dough from scratch, I was a little intimidated. Neither my partner nor I had much experience in baking. At one point, I was certain we had messed up and accidentally killed the yeast for our dough. 

“Don’t worry. This is a resilient dough,” Joo told us as she went around to check on our progress.  

And resilient it was – despite messing up a few steps, our dough had risen nicely and was perfect for the hotteok.  

The next step was to make our kimchi mac and cheese. Joo chose this dish partially because of how easy it was to make – a recipe we could easily implement into our weekly dinner rotations.  

As I hinted at earlier, I was skeptical of this dish. I’m a mac and cheese purist, which means I like my mac and cheese with only…well, mac and cheese. But this dish surprised me in the best way possible. The acidity of the kimchi cut through the richness of the cheese sauce to create a complex flavor profile. If I could have topped it with more kimchi, I would.  

“I hope you all consider adding this dish to your Thanksgiving dinner this year,” Joo said. 

The day before at the conference, Joo said that in order to introduce the world to Korean food, she had to find ways to make the cuisine accessible to people unfamiliar with the cuisine. This was part of why she loved Korean fried chicken so much – almost everyone loves fried chicken, which makes it an easy way to introduce Korean flavors to a wider audience.  

In a way, I felt similarly about the mac and cheese. It may not have been a traditional Korean dish, but it expanded my idea of how kimchi can be used in cooking and made me pay more attention to not only the taste of kimchi, but the texture as well. In other words, adding kimchi to a traditional American dish made me appreciate kimchi even more.

After we all finished our mac and cheese, it was time to finish making the hotteok. We put a sweet filling inside our dough, fried it and before we knew it, it was ready to eat. The hotteok had everything I could possibly want in a dessert – sweet, soft, flaky. And, considering that it was relatively easy to make, I could see myself cooking this again in the future.  

What can be learned from a cooking class with chef Joo? Tasty recipes that you can introduce to your in-laws at the next Thanksgiving, yes. But also a lesson on thinking outside the box. The globalization of Korean food allows not only for people to become more familiar with the cuisine, but also allows for an expansion of what constitutes Korean food. Most people would not think of mac and cheese as a Korean dish, but Joo’s version of mac and cheese certainly elevated the dish with its Korean flavor. This cooking class, and the conference as a whole, captured one of the best parts about cooking: the endless possibilities for making new dishes and how those dishes can transform cultures. As the rest of the world learns about the unique flavors of Korean food, I’m excited to see how this globalization will continue to change Korean food, and how Korean food will change other cuisines.