Chae: Korean Slow Food For A Better Life
Hardie Grant, 2024, RRP $70
By Jung Sun Chae
If you get a new cookbook and routinely skip the introductory parts where the author talks about their life and philosophy, and instead head straight to the pretty pics and recipes, we have a book to challenge that approach. To really understand Chae: Korean Slow Food For A Better Life, you need to read the wordy bits. And what makes this a worthwhile exercise is that they’re actually really interesting, and even somewhat moving.
Outlining her early life with food in Seoul, Korea, where her mother made kimchi, soy sauce, soybean paste and even sesame oil completely from scratch (let that sink in), to her journey to Melbourne where she ended up on the culinary team at fine diner Cutler & Co and the subsequent traffic accident that toppled her career and forced a new direction, there’s so much to digest. And admire. From the relentlessly “endless cycles of food preparation and preservation” of her Korean childhood, borne out of economic necessity, to carving a life in Australia with (initially) zero English, and then overcoming a job-ending event and reinventing herself, Jung Sun Chae’s story is an incredible one. No longer able to work as a fine dining chef, and inspired by an episode of Chef’s Table, she headed to Korea to cook at Baekyangsa temple to learn Temple cuisine, and to spend time with her mum, bonding over batches of homemade kimchi and chilli paste.
Back in Melbourne, Chae started Korean food workshops and a small lunch service in her apartment. Word travelled and, fuelled by the pandemic and exploding interest in fermentation and healthy eating, things really took off. Fast forward to 2024 and Chae is now the name of Chae and her partner’s setup in the hills of rural Victoria where they run workshops, serve meals and grow produce to turn into pickles, preserves, sauces, vinegars and ferments. “When you go deep with Korean food, you make friends with time,” Chae says in the book, explaining the aim of the recipes. She warns that some of the foundational recipes for ferments require special equipment and a long lead time (sometimes many months) and they may appear intimidating. But, she urges, the payback in flavour and goodness is second to none. Happily, she also says the recipes in her book can be made with store-bought equivalents if necessary, so if you’re not up to making the from-scratch persimmon vinegar, gochujang, salted seafood, or fermented soybean paste from the first, foundational chapter, you’re not excluded from using this book.
The book is broken into chapters themed around the four seasons. Winter, for example, offers recipes for cabbage, radish and white kimchi, marinated raw crabs, fermented soybean stew, and porridges like adzuki bean and pumpkin, while Spring has recipes for quickly-made mugwort kimchi and spinach kimchi, braised beef & eggs in soy sauce, Korean knife-cut noodles with fresh pipis, braised snapper and more. We’re salivating over Summer’s chicken breast & cucumber salad, and reckon the red bean shaved ice, with home made adzuki bean paste, glutinous rice balls and milk jam, looks utterly awesome and we plan to have a crack at it. Each of the 80 recipes is centred around minimal waste and an altogether more thoughtful way of cooking. We sense that entering the world of Chae would be somewhat meditative, and even just reading these pages makes us feel calmer! It’s something of a specialist book and not one for the novice, we don’t think. But if you really want to level up your Korean cooking skills and dive deep into the delicious fundamentals, and you love a slower, holistic ethos, you’ll find this a rewarding tome to add to your library.
