Korean cooking is built on the jar and the jang. Long before refrigeration, the Korean kitchen learned to hold the harvest through fermentation — and the fermented soybean pastes, doenjang and ganjang and gochujang, aged for months and years in earthenware onggi, became not a condiment but the foundation everything is seasoned from. To understand Korean food is to understand that depth comes from time.
The structure of a meal is bap and banchan: rice at the centre, ringed by a spread of small dishes — kimchi above all, the fermented vegetable that defines the table and the season. Kimjang, the communal autumn making of a winter's worth of kimchi, is held as cultural heritage; it is also simply how a household used to survive the cold.
Above the everyday sits the refinement of the royal court and the restraint of Buddhist temple cooking, with their balance of five colours and five flavours. And in the last two decades, carried on the same wave as Korean film and music, this food has gone from little-known to everywhere — its fermented depth, long the most overlooked thing in Asian cooking, now the most studied.