39 Korean Recipes to Cook This Week: Fried Chicken, BBQ & Banchan

Almost everything in this collection leans on four cornerstone ingredients, and once they're in your cupboard the cooking gets fast. Gochujang is the thick, fermented red chili paste that gives Korean food its signature sweet-savory heat; a spoonful thickens sauces and glazes and dissolves into soups. Gochugaru, the coarse red pepper flakes, brings brighter, cleaner heat without the sweetness, and it's what you want for kimchi, stews, and dressings. Soy sauce provides the salty umami backbone, and toasted sesame oil, added at the end rather than cooked, delivers that unmistakable nutty aroma.

Round those out with a few supporting players: rice vinegar for pickles and cold-noodle sauces, mirin or a little sugar to balance the chili heat, plenty of garlic and scallions, and toasted sesame seeds for finishing. Short-grain rice is worth buying by the bag, since it turns up in bowls, fried rice, and alongside nearly every main. For sauces, I keep a simple ratio in mind: roughly equal parts gochujang and soy, half as much sugar or honey, then garlic, sesame oil, and a splash of vinegar to taste.

If you can only buy one thing to start, make it gochujang; it single-handedly powers bibimbap, tteokbokki-style rice cakes, spicy chicken, and countless glazes. Store it in the fridge once opened and it keeps for months. Gochugaru also lives happily in the freezer, which preserves its color and heat. With this small kit you can cook the majority of the dishes below without a single specialty trip, and you'll start improvising your own bowls before long.

The whole point of Korean fried chicken is a crust so thin and crisp it stays crackly even after it's coated in sauce. The technique that gets you there is the double fry. Fry the chicken once at a moderate temperature, around 330°F, just until it's cooked through and pale gold, then pull it out and let it rest for a few minutes while the oil comes back up to heat. That rest lets trapped steam escape so the surface can dry out.

For the second fry, push the oil hotter, closer to 375°F, and return the chicken for a couple of minutes until it's deep golden and audibly crisp. This is where the shatter comes from. The coating matters too: a light dredge heavy on cornstarch or potato starch, rather than all wheat flour, fries up glassier and stays crunchier for longer. Some cooks add a splash of vodka or cold sparkling water to the batter, which limits gluten and keeps things delicate.

Sauce it at the very last minute. Warm your gochujang glaze in a wide pan, add the chicken, and toss just to coat so the crust doesn't have time to go soft. If you're skipping the deep fry, an air fryer gets you surprisingly close: spray generously, cook until deeply browned, and finish with the same last-second glaze. Serve immediately, with pickled radish or a quick cucumber salad on the side to cut the richness.

One more thing that separates good from great: oil temperature. Fry in small batches and give the oil a minute to recover between them, because crowding the pot drops the heat and leaves the coating greasy instead of crisp. A cheap probe thermometer takes the guesswork out entirely, and it pays for itself the first time your chicken comes out shatteringly crunchy rather than pale and soggy.

You don't need a tabletop grill to get the flavors of a good barbecue. A ripping-hot cast-iron pan does the job: marinate thin-sliced beef in soy, garlic, sugar, sesame oil, and grated pear or apple, then sear it in batches so it caramelizes instead of steaming. Bulgogi and beef bowls come from exactly this move, and short ribs take the same flavors into a long braise. The bar-b-q ritual is as much about the table as the grill, so serve the meat wrapped in lettuce leaves, with a smear of ssamjang, rice, and a few banchan, and you've recreated the restaurant experience. That lettuce wrap, called ssam, is the classic way to eat it: pile on a little rice, a slice of meat, and a dab of paste, then fold and go.

Hot pot, or a cozy one-pot dish, is the flip side: a bubbling, communal pot of broth you cook proteins and vegetables in at the table. Build a base with anchovy or beef stock, season it with gochujang and gochugaru for a spicy version, then add mushrooms, tofu, greens, thin-sliced meat, and noodles to finish. It's forgiving, scalable, and ideal for feeding a group without much last-minute work. If you want something soothing and unspiced instead, seolleongtang, the milky ox bone soup simmered for hours until the broth turns cloudy and rich, is the classic restorative bowl; season it only at the table with salt, scallions, and a scoop of rice.

Rice cakes, or tteok, deserve a spot too. The chewy cylinders soak up sauce like nothing else, which is why tteokbokki, cooked in a sweet-spicy gochujang sauce, is such a beloved street food. If you're working with dried or refrigerated rice cakes, soak them briefly first so they soften evenly, and stir often near the end because the starch thickens fast and can catch on the pan. Korean sweet potato, dense and honey-sweet, roasts or steams into a simple side; give it 40 to 50 minutes in a hot oven until the flesh is jammy and caramelized at the tips. Together these three ideas, grilled meat, a shared pot, and a tray of rice cakes, cover most of what people picture when they think of a Korean feast, and none of them demand special equipment.