New here? This is the eleventh article in our Banchan Deep Dive series: one Korean side dish per article. If Korean restaurants are new to you, start with Part 1 and Part 2 of the Survival Guide, then the rules for eating banchan. Last time we covered kkakdugi, radish cut into cubes and left in a jar for two weeks. Today's dish is another white block, and it goes into a pan instead.
Recipes vary by restaurant and household. When it matters, ask.
If you have bought firm tofu at an American grocery store, you know the block.
It comes sealed in water. It is white. Cut off a slice and taste it plain. It tastes of very little.
Korean cooks make a side dish out of that kind of block. A sauce built on soy sauce goes in with the tofu, and a few minutes later the dish is done.
A few minutes is not long. Yet what reaches the table tastes of soy sauce.
How much of that sauce actually got into the tofu is a fair question.
The dish is dubu-jorim (두부조림), Korean braised tofu. When a dish of glossy slabs lands on your tray, this is what you are looking at.
What is dubu-jorim?
Dubu-jorim is Korean braised tofu. Firm tofu is sliced into flat slabs, browned in oil on both sides, then cooked down for a few minutes in a sauce built on soy sauce, usually with garlic, scallion, a little sugar, sesame and chili flakes. Dubu means tofu, and jorim means food simmered down until the seasoning has gone into it. It is a banchan, a side dish, and the whole job takes roughly ten to twenty minutes.
What does dubu-jorim taste like?
Salty and savory first, from the soy sauce, with some sweetness underneath and a little heat if the sauce is red. The texture does the rest. The outside of each slab is browned, slightly chewy and carries nearly all the seasoning. The inside stays soft, pale and mild. Every bite gets both, which is the reason the tofu is fried before it is braised.
Is dubu-jorim spicy?
Mildly, when it is spicy at all. Most versions are red with Korean chili flakes, and in those you taste more soy sauce than heat. A brown version seasoned with soy sauce alone is common too and carries no chili. If you want to know which one is coming, the color will tell you before the first bite does.
Is dubu-jorim vegetarian?
Often, but not reliably. The common home recipe is tofu, soy sauce, sugar, garlic, scallion, sesame and chili. Some cooks braise it in anchovy stock instead of water, some add salted shrimp or fish sauce, and popular versions add canned tuna, Spam, pork or beef. Most of that is invisible once the sauce is on. It is not gluten-free as usually made, because ordinary soy sauce is brewed with wheat.
Is dubu-jorim eaten hot or cold?
Either, and cold is normal. It comes out of a pan and is good warm, but it keeps. One recipe writer keeps it in the refrigerator for three or four days, one cookbook for up to a week, and several say it tastes better the next day, eaten cold. In Korea it is a steady seller at shops that sell cooked side dishes by the container, and Korean home cooks list it among the banchan they make ahead for the week.
What is Dubu-jorim?
Dubu-jorim is firm tofu, browned in a pan and then braised in soy sauce. By the end, most of the sauce has gone into it or onto it.
The name is two plain words. Dubu (두부) is tofu. Jorim (조림) comes from the Korean verb for cooking something down. Korea's national encyclopedia defines the category as food cooked slowly over low heat, usually with soy sauce, so the seasoning gets all the way in.
The tofu version is done in minutes. You could stand and watch the whole thing.
It has to be the firm kind. That is the grocery-store block. Sundubu is tofu that was never pressed into a block. It arrives in a stew as soft curds.
This is the other end of the same process. The curd is poured into a cloth-lined mold and weighted until the water runs out. Then it is cut free with a knife. (How a bean becomes that block is a story of its own. This blog is still saving it for an article about the ingredient.)
Kkakdugi is cut into cubes. Tofu for this pan is cut into flat slabs. A standard English-language recipe makes them about half an inch thick. The earliest known Korean one makes them a third of an inch. Forty-four Korean photographs of the dish were pulled and looked at. All but about three were slabs, and that is what you will meet.
A slab has two wide faces. When it reaches you, both of them will have been through the pan.
Why It Goes Into a Pan
Tofu has been in a jar. A Korean cookbook was first published in the nineteen-twenties. An edition printed in the nineteen-thirties describes pressing about ten blocks dry in a cloth bag under a millstone. The bag went into gochujang, the fermented chili paste. It was opened two or three months later.
The braise itself began as a keeping technique. The word jorim first turns up in an old Korean cookbook, attached to beef cooked hard in soy sauce. The virtue the book names is that it keeps a long time without changing.
The earliest written dubu-jorim on record is in a Korean cookbook from the mid-nineteen-sixties. It is almost the method you would meet today. Slice the tofu. Sprinkle it with salt and leave it. Fry it in sesame oil. Layer it in a pot with soy sauce, sugar, threads of dried chili, garlic and sesame. Braise it over medium heat.
Decades later, an American test kitchen fried tofu by a different method. It soaked the tofu first in hot salted water. In its account, the heat and the salt in that water draw moisture out of the surface. That helps it crisp and brown. The hot water also tightens the proteins there. Whether the old Korean salting does any of that, the Korean book never says.
The same test kitchen fried firm tofu and slid it into a sauce. It reports that the outside turned lightly chewy and soaked up the flavor. The inside stayed creamy and moist.
Korean recipe sites repeat a version of that idea. They say seasoning will not soak far into tofu, so you brown the outside for the sauce to stick to. This blog could not find anyone who has measured how far in the soy sauce actually gets.
On the first bite, the edge is salty. The middle is mild.
What changed since the nineteen-sixties is the dose. That old recipe braises about fourteen ounces of tofu in half a cup of soy sauce. The English-language recipes put three tablespoons on a slightly larger block. None of the sources found for this article says why the amount came down so far.
What the Soy Sauce Is Doing
This blog's family story has a Chuseok table in Ohio. There, Soo-jin served Bob Miller a bowl of clear soup. He looked into it and said the obvious thing. "There's no soy sauce in it."
"There is. It is the other one."
The other one was soup soy sauce, the pale bottle. It is lighter and saltier than the dark kind. It goes mostly into soups and seasoned vegetables. In that bowl, part of its value was what it would not do to the color.
In this pan nobody is protecting any color. The ordinary soy sauce goes in. The dark bottle.
One Korean maker says its dark soy sauce is 16 percent salt. It says its soup soy sauce is 21 to 24. In this dish, soy sauce is essentially the only seasoning that is salty at all. The sugar, garlic, scallion and sesame are arranged around it.
One laboratory analysis of soy sauce measured fifteen amino acids. The most concentrated was glutamate, the amino acid behind the taste people call savory or umami.
Salt let the old beef braise keep. The dose has come down a long way since.
The sauce goes in for only a few minutes and is cooked down. On your plate it is often a glaze, often a little pooled.
Red, Brown, and Everything Else
Of those forty-four Korean photographs, about three in four were red. Red is the one you are most likely to meet. The rest were brown.
The red version adds chili flakes to the soy sauce. It is the one behind English-language recipe titles like spicy braised tofu. The brown one is soy sauce alone. Korean recipes call it ganjang dubu-jorim. If you want no heat at all, it is the one to hope for. The red one is not very hot either.
In Korean searches, Spam is near the top of what people type after the name. So are pork and beef. Ground meat is on the list too, further down. Recipe titles add canned tuna, potato, fish cake, small green peppers and perilla oil. There is a soupier version with more liquid left in the pan. There is a temple-style version cooked without garlic or scallion.
The searches also include the names of television cooks. One TV cook's recipe uses oyster sauce. Separately, one published Korean recipe adds a spoon of cooking wine.
Some additions you cannot see at all. Some cooks use anchovy stock instead of water. A Korean newspaper's home-cooking column adds a little salted shrimp for depth. One Korean-American cook uses fish sauce. Every one of those dissolves into a glaze the same color as the plain one. You cannot pick them out by looking.
At least one New York restaurant makes its own tofu in-house. It sells spicy braised tofu as a dish of its own, in a giant bowl.
The Day After
The kkakdugi article closed by saying this was one of the few things on the banchan tray that has to be made on the day you eat it. That was wrong.
One Korean recipe writer says it is good warm or cold. The tofu tastes even better the next day, the writer says. It was a regular in the lunch boxes of the writer's own school days.
Another keeps leftovers three or four days in the refrigerator. That writer eats them cold, because the flavor deepens. A Korean-American family cookbook says it is good straight out of the refrigerator the next day. It keeps for up to a week.
In Korea it sells from side-dish shops. Those trade in cooked food by the container. Home cooks put it in their titles for a week's worth of banchan.
Fresh from the pan, the tofu is softer and wetter. A Korean lifestyle site complains that a single night in the refrigerator leaves it firm and dry. Its fix: store the slabs under their sauce. It does not tell you to stop making them ahead.
Eating It
Take it at whatever temperature it arrives. A cold plate does not mean the kitchen forgot it. Warm means somebody just made it for you. Cold slabs are firmer.
Eat it with rice, not by itself. It is seasoned to be salty against something plain, like other banchan. A slab eaten alone is a lot of soy sauce. You eat a corner of one with a mouthful of plain rice.
Ask about the stock, not the tofu. Ask a server whether the tofu dish is vegetarian. They will think about tofu and give you an honest answer. What changes the answer is the liquid it was braised in, and whatever was stirred into the sauce. Those are the invisible additions from earlier. Ask what went into the sauce. If you avoid gluten, the soy sauce alone settles it. The ordinary kind is brewed with wheat.
Why This Dish Matters
The grocery-store block tastes of very little. Hot oil browns it first. Then the sauce goes in, and the browned surface soaks up the flavor.
Cut open, a slab of dubu-jorim is still soft and pale inside.
Back at the store, the next block is still sitting in its water. It is white all the way through.
Still to come in the Menu Deep Dives: seolleongtang. In this pan the soy sauce goes in before the dish reaches you. In the pale soup at that Chuseok table, it was chosen so the broth would stay clear. Seolleongtang goes one step further. It reaches the table after hours of boiling bone with no seasoning in it at all. The salt is left for you. Why it is milky, why the kitchen will not salt it, and what goes into the bowl once it is in front of you.
If this series is your kind of thing, subscribe. One Korean side dish at a time, until the little plates stop being a mystery.
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