Gochujang
Korean red chilli paste
Gochujang or red chili paste is a savory, sweet, and spicy fermented condiment popular in Korean cooking. It is made from gochugaru (red chili powder), chapssal (glutinous rice), meju (fermented soybean) powder, yeotgireum (barley malt powder), and salt. The sweetness comes from the starch of cooked glutinous rice, cultured with saccharifying enzymes during the fermentation process. Traditionally, it would be naturally fermented over years in jangdok (earthenware) on an elevated stone platform called jangdokdae in the backyard.
History
Shiyi xinjian (食醫心鑑), a mid-9th-century Chinese document, recorded the Korean pepper paste as 苦椒醬 (pinyin: kǔ jiāo jiàng, lit. 'pepper paste'). The second-oldest documentation of pepper paste is found in the 1433 Korean book Collected Prescriptions of Native Korean Medicines. Pepper paste is again mentioned in a 1445 medical encyclopedia named Compendia of Medical Prescriptions. However, all these sources are from the time before the actual chili peppers were introduced to Korea.
Chili peppers, which originated in the Americas, were introduced to East Asia by Portuguese traders in the early 16th century. There is mention of a type of chili pepper brought to Korea found in Collected Essays of Jibong, an encyclopedia published in 1614.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gochujang” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.