89. Jangajji (장아찌), in the Northern Style

 (Epistemic status: what, you thought that this somehow wasn't a recipe blog?)

 

This is a recipe blog. It always has been, at least in part. I'm not going to give you the recipe until the very end, because that's what recipe blogs do, right? I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of irrelevant-feeling personal context about the food and then finally actually drop the recipe. But unlike most recipe blogs, that personal context is actually really quite relevant.

You ever think about lost recipes? They're a tragic microcosm of lost information in greater generality. There's lost plays like Love's Labours Won, lost books like the second volume of the Poetics, lost music like Karelia Music, and lost film like Bulgasari. Each one is a wound in human culture that will never heal. There's entire lost libraries, too - the House of Wisdom during the sack after the Sack of Baghdad, the Library of Alexandria (whose books fell apart - they largely weren't burned), and the Oriental Library. In just the same way, there are foods that we no longer know how to make, the very existence of which has often been lost, too; and there are whole culinary traditions that are largely lost as well - either by the destruction of the entire cultures that they were a part of, or... well. We'll get to that.

Jangajji (장아찌) is the name for an entire class of sauce-pickled vegetables. You can make garlic jangajji steeped in sweet soy sauce, and both use the whole cloves and the rich sauce. You can make chilli jangajji, the spice of the pepper calming with time and marination. You can even make jicama jangajji - the pleasant crunch of the vegetable not fading with pickling as might other vegetables. This isn't about any of those, or even about the usual form of daikon radish jangajji, which starts with fresh daikon radish. No, this is about daikon radish jangajji in the Northern style. The provenance isn't clear to me, and it likely never will be, because this is Grandma Kim's family recipe from ages past, when she grew up on the outskirts of Anju and Pakcheon.

Indeed, she tells me that her family once had a whole library's worth of recipes - pickles, stews, fritters, and more. But much of that was lost in the flight to the South, much of what remained from that was lost in the (calmer) move to the West, and much of what remained was lost to the vagaries of memory and scarcity of supplies. Now, all we have of that lost food culture  - to the best of my knowledge - is this one dish. And even that, too, was very nearly lost to time.

And I have an archivist's instinct, you see. The thought of losing information for good horrifies me. The classic Old Country recipe format of "a pinch of this, a handful of that, three glugs of the other, and season with your heart, pass it down orally if you feel like it" was simply not good enough for me. Not reliable, not repeatable, not lasting, and worst of all, certainly not developable. There's no experimentation possible when you don't have a good baseline. And so it was that I found myself maybe a decade ago, asking Grandma Kim to make a batch of the dried daikon jangajji so beloved by her family, friends, and friends of the family, and what's more, to let me stop her every time she measured out a handful of this or a seasoned with her heart so that I could get her to dump that out into a measuring cup - bless her for her patience. Bit by bit, I took down the recipe, saving it for posterity; at last, we could rest easily, knowing that this recipe, this priceless bit of information from a long-gone food culture, would be preserved at least for a few decades. Even when Grandma Kim passed, I would be able to make it for myself.

 

Just kidding! It turned out that I'd forgotten to write down a few key ingredients and more importantly hadn't actually taken adequate notes on process. What needs to be added before what? What should the dried daikon look like after the washing step? Does anything need to be done especially fast? All good questions, and ones that the recipe I'd taken down had no answers to. And so it was - after an argument over whether or not it would be worth it to use the local Korean grocery store's slightly suspect dried daikon instead of her late friend's home-dried - that I found myself maybe 3 years ago repeating the process in a different kitchen, with a few more years' worth of wisdom and careful process controls, taking additional notes on process, substitutability, and optional ingredients.Surely now I was done, right? There was nothing more to do, having successfully taken down sufficient written information to reproduce the recipe?

 

Nope! Don't be ridiculous. Three major things remained. First off was proving to myself that I could make jangajji all on my own. I had Grandma Kim watch me as I made a fair-sized batch myself from start to finish, asking for advice and information when I didn't know how to do the next step - what to look for, what would be a problem, what an expected outcome from each step looked like. Each time that occurred, I took down some notes about what I'd need to know. The result spoke for itself: I sent out jam jars packed with jangajji to all the usual suspects Grandma Kim liked to mail and courier them to, but we agreed that we would tell no one that she had had no direct hand in the preparation. The reviews came back in - just as good as ever - and turned to impressed surprise when they learned that I'd made the batch myself. Success - now the work could truly begin.

After that came figuring out optimizations to the process. The jangajji requires finely ground gochugaru. Did you know that you can make that out of coarser gochugaru using a food processor? Grandma Kim didn't, but I did. Likewise, it's not necessary to painstakingly mince garlic and ginger by hand. A food processor will take care of that just fine as well. And you don't need to add the seasonings in the precise order she traditionally did, or have to do everything sequentially - you can combine a lot of the seasonings together in advance while you wait for the broth to steep and then add the lot to the mix. What corners could you readily cut? What lines were there to read between, looking for ingredients that had to have been adaptations made after coming to America?

Lastly came research, development, and problem-solving. Asking Grandma Kim what other optional ingredients could be added as garnishes yielded answers including yukhoe (a kind of beef jerky), salt pork or bacon, dried squid, dried mushrooms, and pearl onions, on top of the usual pair of sesame seeds and pine nuts. I thought of three of my cousins, all deathly allergic to pine nuts and sesame seeds, much like I'm deathly allergic to most nuts (but thankfully not pine nuts). An idea struck me - what if I made a batch of jangajji for those cousins, who after all had never in their lives been able to take part in the delicacy so beloved of the entire rest of the family for the last few decades? A fundamental concept in making recipe substitutions - think always of the role that a given ingredient plays, and this will tell you what's appropriate to swap in for it. In this case - what role, exactly, were sesame seeds, sesame oil, and pine nuts all playing in this dish? Some careful thought and sensory memory yielded a clear answer: textural interest and savory fattiness. What to swap in, then? An answer came to mind almost immediately: homemade bacon bits, relatively crispy and without having the oil patted dry. As is sometimes the case with my obvious-feeling ideas, a taste test told me and Grandma Kim both that it had worked first try. The cousins were at last allowed to enjoy, and Grandma Kim and the rest of the family were awed by my iconoclastic demonstration of a kind of archivism and a kind science feeding into each other in a way that struck at the heart of the ethoi of Old Country-coded chefs everywhere: the secrets of the past are important and invaluable, and yet they still certainly admit improvement and modification.

I promised a recipe at the end. Here's the recipe. Now I'm truly finished - the recipe will never be lost, not if Grandma Kim passes away, not if my private Discord servers die, not if my house burns down, not if I myself should die. At last, dried daikon jangajji in the Northern style as made by the Shim family can be commended to the ages. My work is done - until I take on the bonus challenge of optimizing it further and testing new variants. I'm thinking beef jerky, shiitake mushrooms, and pearl onion...

Broth:
5c water
1/2 c dried anchovy
1 medium onion, coarsely sliced
1 medium ginger root, peeled and cut in 3 (~3 in^3 or 4 thumb-sized peeled pieces)
2 sheets dashima (~32 in^2)
1/2 a large asian pear

Boil for ~10 minutes, take broth, and discard the solids.

Radish: (This is the main ingredient and what you should use as a base for ratios to scale up or down.)
3.5# (1.6kg) dried mu/daikon - specifically 3.5# of dry mass (and standard packages are 0.4 kg in mass)

Rinse the dried mu briskly to avoid its soaking up too much water.
Rinse twice in a basin.
First rinse: thorough, with a scrubbing motion, until the dried mu begins to soften. Squeeze out and collect the radish in a colander.
Second rinse: A quicker rinse. Squeeze and collect.

Seasonings:
2.5c low-sodium soy sauce, 3.5c soba concentrate, or mix
1.5c gochugaru (Korean red pepper), finely ground - a food processor works to more finely grind coarse gochugaru.
0.5c white wine (not red)
0.75c oligosaccharide syrup, light corn syrup, or maybe honey

Add the soy/soba first, then the gochugaru to the rinsed dried mu, one at a time, mixing and macerating each time. Ensure that the gochugaru is well-distributed. After the soy, wait 30 minutes. Then add the wine and oligo syrup to the broth once cool. (You can also add the gochugaru first - it doesn't hugely matter so long as they're added separately and even that probably doesn't matter.)

Cool the broth. Once room temperature, add 2 cups of it to the dried mu mixture. Because the dashima and dried anchovy absorb water, this should be basically all of the broth. 

Added seasonings: (to taste, strong guidelines)
1c garlic, minced
1/3c ginger, minced finely, possibly juice only - or equal volume of ground ginger
3c pine nuts
3c sesame seeds
1c korean leek/daepa
1c sesame oil
5 tbs sugar (or to taste)
salt to taste
~1c(?) pearl onions if you have them

The garlic and ginger can be minced in a food processor, but should be roughly minced, not blended. From this point it's pretty freeform, and you can even start adding seasonings before the broth, or to the broth. Add the additional seasonings to the seasoned mu mix. If too dry, add ~1c soba concentrate or leftover broth if available. Pack tightly in a jar, ensuring no air pockets and minimal headspace. Top with sesame seeds for garnish.

If you need to swap in bacon for the sesame and pine nuts, first and foremost be sure not to add the sesame oil, either. I recommend swapping in roughly 2 cups of relatively crispy (but not quite brittle) bacon bits chopped relatively coarsely for the pine nuts, sesame seeds, and sesame oil.

And you, does your family (bio or chosen) have any famed recipes? If you don't write them down, they will inevitably be lost. Better yet, if you want to improve on them or test variants, you need a solid place to start! The palest ink outdoes the strongest memory, so get writing.