Kimchi Fried Rice

Ever since moving to LA, I've started eating a lot more Korean food and wanted to learn how to make it. In poking around YouTube, I stumbled across one of Maangchi's videos, and... proceeded to watch about 70 more! Like everybody else, I LOVE her videos. She has a great way of going through recipes slowly and showing all of the techniques you'll need to use in a really simple, easy-to-follow way. I decided to give her kimchi fried rice a shot, and it was great! I made a few changes to her base recipe in order to use up some more of the stuff in my fridge, but I'll note those below.

Mise en place! 

My modifications were as follows:

Instead of using vegetable oil to start, I had a strip of bacon I needed to use up, so I diced it and rendered the fat to start. I poured some of the fat off into a separate pan so I could use that to fry up the eggs, since I wanted to attempt a "restaurant-style" version of kimchi fried rice with a sunny-side-up egg on top.

In addition to the diced bacon, I also had some sheets of Korean fish cake in my refrigerator, so I diced that up and tossed it in to cook in the beginning with the bacon and chopped kimchi.

Instead of adding gochujang, sesame oil, and sesame seeds separately, I added spoonfuls of leftover bibimbap sauce I'd made. (You can find that recipe here.) Since the core ingredients were largely the same (just with a little added sugar, vinegar, and garlic), I figured it would be a suitable substitute.

Kimchi Fried Rice

from Maangchi

Ingredients

1 tsp vegetable oil

1 cup chopped kimchi

3 cups cooked white rice

¼ cup kimchi juice

¼ cup water

2-3 tbsp gochujang, depending on spice preference

3 tsp sesame oil

1 green onion, chopped

1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds

1 sheet of roasted seaweed, shredded (optional)

Instructions

1. Heat up a pan. Add the vegetable oil.

2. Add the kimchi and stir fry for 1 minute. 

3. Add the rice, kimchi juice, water, and gochujang. Stir all ingredients together for about 7 minutes with a wooden spoon.

4. Add sesame oil and remove from the heat.

5. Sprinkle with chopped green onion, roasted seaweed if using, and sesame seeds. Serve right away.

I'm not kidding when I say, this is so good. I appreciate being able to customize the level of chili paste heat in the dish, being a bit of a spice wimp myself! And the base version of this dish is definitely simple enough for a lazy day; if you have store-bought kimchi and gochujang on hand, this is pretty quick to whip up. Maybe someday I'll be brave enough to try making my own kimchi like Maangchi does, but for now I think I'll just watch the videos...!

Enjoy! :)