This type of article isn’t as glamorous as some other recipes I share here, nonetheless, I thought it would be great to share my list to enhance your Korean cooking knowledge and help you update your pantry if necessary. 🙂

Korean chili powder / Hot pepper flakes (Gochugaru: 고추가루) – Most Korean spiciness comes from this magic powder called gochugaru. It is essentially made with dried Korean red chilies. It mainly comes in two different formats – fine and coarse. Fine chili powder is mostly used when making gochujang and coarse chili powder covers the rest of Korean cooking needs.

So I buy coarse chili powder more frequently and store it in my fridge as it can get mouldy if you don’t store it well (e.g. storing it at room temperature). If your gochugaru starts hardening, you can use the food processor to separate it again. Just a few seconds of pulse will fix it. Read more about it from my other post – Gochugaru.

Soy sauce (Ganjang: 간장) – There are a few different kinds of soy sauce available in Korea. Each of those have a different name based on the ingredients used and/or the method of brewing. I will cover that in more detail in a separate post some other time as it can be lengthy.

For my day to day cooking needs (e.g. stir fry, braising etc), I use 100% naturally brewed soy sauce – Kikoman brand. If you’re looking to buy a Korean brand of this kind, Yangjo Ganjang (양조간장) is the name you should be looking for. For soup and stew, I use soy sauce that’s made for soup. It’s saltier than other kinds of soy sauce but the color is lighter. It can be also be used as an alternative to salt and it adds deeper umami.