Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where I have already broken the compact I formed with myself for Tuesday’s post, and referred to gimbap as Kimbap for the sake of an interesting title. Insert the necessary musical reference now.

One Hanson, coming right up!

I…meant a K-Pop one, but sure, that’ll do. Anyway, listen: I’m not going to lie to you good people. Or you bad people. The so-so’s? I will lie to, but only to enliven your day. The point is that I want to be upfront that I don’t really have a plan for this post, and I do NOT want to spend a lot of time agonizing over how to do it right: I am starting a weekend getaway at 4 PM today, so this thing needs to be in the fucking bag and nailed to the wall like the gruesome trophies of my Witcher hunts no later than 2 PM so I flop myself into a car and drive to the site and claim the bedroom I want.

A Direct Conduit to All the Crazy.

That’s the dumbest AC/DC joke you’ve ever written, Title Jon, and we went with Kimbap so the acronym for this post was ACK. Self-flagellation aside until private time, we’ve got two things we’re talking about today, not a TON to say about either of them, and if I thought it had any chance of working, I’d offload half this post onto Nate. But he’s busy being a typical Taurus and refusing to do anything that he doesn’t think will bring him joy. Also, asleep. Because I didn’t start this until 1 AM, because today was a Wednesday jam-packed with a business call, tele-therapy, and also watching Shang-Chi, because I felt bad about not watching Black Widow when it came out, so now I’m trying to make up for it by…watching the Marvel wuxia film, a genre I already knew I liked. Very brave sacrifice, me.

It was a good time. Ronnie Cheng’s role, and the whole Macau sequence, though fairly small, is a particular delight.

THE POINT is that Nate would actually be a better host for talking about one of the two topics: Aaron and Claire. Who yes, are two people, but one topic. I said we don’t have time, and I wasted more of it with astrology and Marvel. Aaron and Claire, as referenced in LAST weeks’ post, is a YouTube channel run by a Korean couple, Aaron and Claire, whose last names I didn’t look up for PRIVACY reasons, not because I was too lazy, and their website’s “About” section, the only source I checked, was blank. Anywho, their videos are very straight-forward: Aaron makes a dish, or makes a series of dishes based on a given ingredient, and then serves them to Claire, who tells Aaron and the viewer how they taste. Aaron hits a very particular vibe with his vids, which I would call “one part Joshua Weissman, one part Chef John”. Since I don’t expect you to be as terminally online as me, let me break that down:

Joshua Weissman, mentioned before on the channel, is a YouTube chef with, in my opinion, a great level of controlled Chaos in his videos: while making his “but cheaper”, “but better”, and other videos, there’s a lot of…silliness.

I don’t follow. Is this man not a Balloon person?

Recurring bits like Facials distortions/zooms, emotionally-moved-to-sing, the emphasis he puts on the word “papa”, which he uses to describe himself, threatening to withhold “keesss” (kiss), there’s a lot of fun kookiness. He’s an actual chef, but he’s clearly having fun and horsing around.

Then there’s Chef John, from Foodwishes dot com, wiiiith…an intro you only recognize if you watch his stuff. Chef John, unlike Josh, doesn’t show his face on camera in his main videos, instead only shooting his hands and the cooking vessels. He uses an interestingly unique, kind-of sing-song cadence for a lot of his videos. He also has several bits (he will almost always include, when suggesting a potential alteration to a dish, a line of “you are, after all, the RHYMING REFERENCE of your DISH NAME.”, he adds a dash of cayenne to most dishes he makes, and several others.

Aaron shows his face at the intro the video, as he greets the viewer and introduces the ingredient or dish, but then disappears behind the camera. I don’t BELIEVE he was a chef before his YouTube career. He has several bits, such as whispering whenever he suggests adding MSG to a dish, due to the stigma against it in the West, a love of green onion, and a very ready attitude toward alterations: seemingly EVERY video includes at least two points where he says “you can/could do X…but if you don’t want to, that’s fine.” “These vegetables are just for texture, so if you don’t have any, or don’t want to chop them, just skip it.” “If you do it this way, it’ll be better, but if you wanna save time, that’s fine.” His signature phrase, if you wanted to impose one, would probably be “Don’t worry ‘bout it”.

This is him offering a replacement FOR a replacement in their latest video, where, in the first 5 minutes, he notes 5 ways you can change or just not add things.

I think it was that attitude that brought him into Nate’s good graces, which I have no complaints with, as it motivated the last two weeks’ dishes. Aaron’s fun, and makes a concerted effort to keep recipes simple and accessible. The ease and confidence with which he assures you “it’s still gonna be good” makes you really believe that you can pull it off.

And Claire’s feedback on how good the dish is as she eats it is another good confidence booster, AND it serves to highlight little details on how the dish should end up tasting/be composed. “I love the way the green onion’s still a little crunchy, for a contrast with the noodles” lets you know that if your green onion looks like it’s getting too soft, hurry your ass up.

It’s a great channel for some nice quick videos to get introductions to Korean dishes. Dishes like Kimbap, which is the OTHER topic we’re supposed to handle today.

The Many Rolls we Weave

Very dumb, Title Jon, thank you for your minimal effort. THIS is efficiency, people! Now, as I briefly mentioned last week, there’s several varieties of Kimbap than the version we made, and I just wanted to touch on them here, so if you master that technique and need a way to stretch yourself, you can level up to the next level of swimming class/martial arts.

When I learn how to karate kick in this thing, y’all are gonna get it.

The easiest one to explain is “nude gimbap”, which is just Gimbap without the seaweed on the outside. Specifically, the seaweed’s on the inside, which you achieve through the pro move of “flipping the thing over before adding the filling.” It’s mainly only used if you’re going to add something to the now-exposed rice, like an extra sauce, or melted cheese. (I cannot overstate how often modern Korean dishes will have variants that just say “And then melt some cheese on that bitch.”)

“Triangle Gimbap” is “Alright, so we already ripped off sushi, let’s ALSO rip off onigiri”. Or, as Pokemon fans might call them, “Jelly Donuts”.

In Pokemon’s defense, “a rice ball filled with pickled plum” IS probably best explained to children as “like a Japanese jelly donut”.

Beyond those, there are two regional variants: the first, Chungmu-gimbap, doesn’t fill the roll with anything. They’re thinner little tubes of rice, that you eat with radish kimchi and squid salad. Think of them like…the veggie spring roll to Gimbap’s egg roll. They’re smaller, less complicated, and meant to be part of a like, an appetizer.

The second is “Mayak” gimbap, or “crack” gimbap, AKA “mini gimbap” and “the Gimbap of Many Names”. About ¼ the size of normal gimbap (made by just cutting the sheet of seaweed into quarters), these come with a special sauce of Korean mustard mixed with soy sauce (and other flavorings) and are not sliced into individual rolls before eating. The smaller size supposedly makes the flavors taste more concentrated, and combined with the special sauce, the recipe is supposedly addictive, hence “crack gimbap.” (Technically, “mayak” just means “an addictive drug”, but in the US, we use “crack” as the shorthand for that because it sounds better.)

Everyone got it? There’s more ways to make Gimbap, Aaron and Claire’s a cool channel, they have recipes for two of the variants discussed here, and like, 8 other forms of gimbap, so check out this video if you wanna explore the dish, and it’s now 2:30 AM, so if I pass out now, I can wake up at 10, and get everything sorted out to be on the road in time. PEACE.

MONDAY: DRINK IT UP, BABY.

THURSDAY: SORRY, CAN’T TALK, MUST GO NOW.