If your palms are lined in glittering inexperienced flecks of roasted seaweed, you’re doing it appropriate. (Whatever you ruin, don’t wipe them for your pants.)

Seaweed palms like turn into a brand recent section of my dinner routine thanks to Eric Kim, the Unusual York Cases food columnist and author of Korean American, one in every of my favourite cookbooks of the one year to this level. While studying the tales about his mom’s kimchi fridge(s) and cooking your arrangement by arrangement of the recipes, you open to feel like you’ve been mates with Kim since childhood. He’s humorous and warmth and moreover a nice teacher. Each of his almost-100 recipes, which pull from his Korean upbringing in Atlanta, are easy to coach, extremely adaptable, and repeatedly dazzling.

The 2d I acquired a PDF of his book, I started cooking from it, ignoring the total various books I became once speculated to be reviewing. And every recipe I’ve made to this level, from the gochujang-and-brown-sugar-dusted cauliflower to the Sprite-marinated short ribs, has acquired stuck in my head like a boppy pop tune.

Nonetheless none as worthy as the creamy bucatini with roasted seaweed, or gim (김)—which is the Korean observe for an edible seaweed moreover known as laver. That it’s doubtless you’ll also favor gim in fats-dimension sheets or in those tiny $2 plastic snack packs. To no longer be puzzled with Eastern nori, gim is roasted and brushed with sesame oil and salt, so it has a filthy rich nutty sort. Coincidentally, Kim is a homonym for gim, which he formula out in an essay within the book as if to negate: We’re one.

“All americans thinks of kimchi and gochujang after they mediate Korean cooking,” he continues, “however for me nothing tells the epic of [South Korea] like seaweed,” which grows prolifically alongside the country’s shorelines. The rectangular slips of gim, he writes, “atomize into a thousand salty pieces as soon as you pop them on your mouth.”

Gim appears to be like in Korean American like a habitual star cameo on a prolonged-running sitcom, lighting fixtures up the room with its magnetic presence. (Additionally more or much less actually—the stuff makes the total lot it touches shimmer.)

About a of gim’s supreme hits in Korean American: It’s integrated with butter into grits and gochugaru-seasoned diminutive in a lustrous web on the Southern staple; it’s sprinkled atop avocado toast and kimchi fried rice for added oomph; it’s whisked into the fish sauce vinaigrette for a Little Gem salad; and, most likely basically the most ingenious narrate, it’s in a bitter cream dip for roasted potatoes that might like ol’ bitter cream–and–onion dip shaking in its boots.

Nonetheless that bucatini! It’s my recent “pantry pasta”—that cliché but comely branding for pasta made and not using a topic’s lying around, in most cases anchovies or various tinned fish, canned this and that, crimson chile flakes. None of those ingredients achieves what gim does, even supposing, which is why I’m right here writing about it. On the side of a garlic-and-cream sauce, Kim writes that the seaweed creates a filthy rich, diminutive Alfredo sort—with out the diminutive. It’s deeply appetizing and straight away comforting.

It’s easy to play with too. Final evening I added a pair of handfuls of spinach to wilt on the ruin for added greenery and gochugaru for refined warmth. I seen a BA commenter who added basil and urged lemon zest. Kim himself has a more elaborate model within the Cases with asparagus and crimson onion. Establish it your receive—finest map it in most cases.

Starring gim: