The Korean Cookbook Reviews
Dok Suni (Hardcover) by Jenny Kwak (Author), Liz Fried (Author)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Dok Suni is an enchanting combination of personal narrative and appealing recipes in which Jenny Kwak shares stories and food from her mother's Korean kitchen. Since few cooks are familiar with Korean food, it is helpful that Kwak's descriptions of each dish tell what results to expect: Spinach and Clam Soup, you discover, "is good boiling hot (yet) there is a cool sensation about the flavor ... from the clams."
The 70 recipes in this volume include important classic Korean dishes. There are six versions of Kim Chi, the incendiary pickle made from cabbage or other vegetables, garlic, and mounds of red pepper. Bibimbop, a dish of sautéed chopped vegetables served over rice--often in a heated clay dish--is topped with a raw egg that cooks as you mix it in.
Proving how much Koreans love beef, Kwok gives her mother's recipes for Bulgogi and Kalbi. Bulgogi is thinly sliced beef marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice wine, then grilled. The short ribs used for Kalbi are similarly marinated before they are barbecued.
A caveat is necessary. Though Dok Suni is coauthored by a native English speaker, select recipes contain some questionable or incomplete directions. For the Pumpkin Porridge, the black beans are cooked for only five minutes, and no presoaking is called for, which seems an inadequate cooking time. Where brown rice is called for, there is no indication whether to use short or long grain. This being said, the book is still an inspirational introduction to Korean cooking that's also filled with Korean folklore and charming family narratives. --Dana Jacobi
From Library Journal
The second book on Korean food in a matter of months is proof that interest in this cuisine is indeed growing. Kwak and her mother own a popular Korean restaurant in New York City (Dok Suni, its name, means "strong woman"). Kwak's book is a more personal one than Deborah Coultrip-Davis and Young Sook Ramsay's Flavors of Korea (LJ 9/15/98) and, unlike their book, is not vegetarian. However, Coultrip-Davis and Ramsay include far more recipes than Kwak's 75, with more information about the cuisine as well.
Still, given the paucity of books on the subject, Dok Suni is recommended for most larger collections (despite its inflated price). Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
4.0 out of 5 stars Delicious!, January 7, 2005
By Schmoo (California)
I am a vegetarian, so I can't answer to the criticism of the beef recipes, but I've had the duk bok gee, jap chae, kim chee soup, tofu side dish, and several others (probably spelling these incorrectly) - and they all turned out GREAT, better than my mother's cooking. There were no problems in the amount/proportions of the ingredients like previous reviewers indicated and I refer to this cookbook, pages spattered with food, often when I feel like eating Korean.
This is the first Korean cookbook I own (I'm Korean), and I never felt the need to purchase another one.
5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, wonderful book!, February 21, 2004
By Erin "BamaVetStudent" (Auburn, AL United States)
I love this book! My mother is Korean so I was raised in a Korean and American household. Thus, I love Korean food! Having spent most of my life in the states, I don't get to eat good Korean food often enough though. My mom can cook all of my favorites wonderfully, but I have trouble learning from her because there are no "set" amounts for some of the spices and ingredients. This book makes it all easy. It has my four favorite Korean dishes--kimchee, duk gook, kimbop, and bibimbop (yum!)--in addition to many other traditional dishes.
The book itself is beautiful and I love the personal stories and pictures from Jenny Kwak's life. Another nice touch is the Korean text and correct Korean pronounciation for each of the recipe titles. You will enjoy this book. The recipes are easy to follow and deliciously flavorful.
4.0 out of 5 stars excellent recipes, good stories but only a few pictures , March 1, 2007
By D. Chung (New York, NY)
I am a korean who has grown up eating korean food for at least one meal of the day, for my entire life. In addition, i've eaten at countless korean restaurants... So i can, at least, say that I know what korean food 'should' taste like.
PROS: I've tried about 10 of Kwak's recipes so far, and they have all come out very authentic and tasty. She includes a good mix of very common dishes and more advanced dishes, with a good number of pan-chan recipes. Her ingredient lists aren't excessively long like some other cookbooks, but some of the ingredients might require a trip to the korean store (beef dashida powder). Her memoir type style and her personal touches add alot to the enjoyment of the food. Sometimes it sounds like she's reminiscing about the recipes with tears in her eyes. Some could consider these digressions unnecessary, but I found it adds 'soul' to the recipes. And the family pictures are a real nice touch.
CONS: There are pictures of food, but only in the context of telling her family story. They mostly show up in the glossy insert sections in the middle of the book. There are no individual pictures that accompany each recipe. For koreans this might not be a problem, but if you're new to korean food, you might need to see what the finished dish 'should' look like. Secondly, I just wish there were more recipes. Don't get me wrong there are alot (about 77), but wanted more soup and meat recipes and less rice porridge dishes and sweet, snack-type foods. Well i guess my second point isn't really a 'con' because all the 'major' recipes are here. Now that i trust her cooking, I just want more of it, that's all. Lastly I wish she included a table of contents that includes the name of each recipe in a single list. The table of contents breaks down by category, then you have to flip through the entire category to find the recipe that you're looking for. (My copy has about 20 post-it notes on it now). Although I think this may have been deliberate, because the book reads like a memoir, so there are personal stories associated with many of the recipes.
Jenny and her mom own Dok Suni, which is a korean restaurant down on the lower east side of manhattan. Naturally, the food is excellent and it has a good reputation for 'cool' or 'hip' korean food. Although the decor is a bit...hmmm, eclectic? The recipe for the jalapeno fried chicken served at the restaurant (probably the most popular dish) is included in the book. For Dok Suni fans, this should justify the cost of the book itself.
Given the reasonable price of the book and the personal stories that add 'soul' to the recipes, i would highly recommend this book. I just wish there were more pictures. I can't wait for the follow up book.
5.0 out of 5 stars Authentic, but friendly with culinary amateurs, December 16, 2005
By J. Im (New York, N.Y.)
Let me start out by admitting one fact: while I've grown up eating Korean food, I've never dared to try my hand at cooking it until only recently. My mother was an undefeated cooking whirlwind in our kitchen and when it came to the point where I thought I'd like to learn from her, I realized I would need more help than her 'a pinch of this' and 'a handful of that' pointers.
Jenny Kwak has written a book that seems to have been made just for amateus like myself, who are willing to test the waters but unsure of where to start. The common complaint I've heard with most Asian cookbooks such as this one is the difficulty of finding ingredients and the level of skills that the writer assumes. Let's be real here. Who knows what it means to ferment pickled cabbage in subzero temperature (and yes, I've actually read this in another book)? Dok Suni starts out with a couple of helpful pages entitled, 'Mom's Shopping List', where she lists ALL of the more-than-average ingredients she uses in the recipes to follow. She gives a nice description of what it is, what dish(es) they are used in, and its name in Korean (which is nice because now you can go into an Asian grocery and ask for it by name if you can't find them yourself).
The recipes themselves are, according to my very Korean mother, practically perfect in their authenticity. Instead of veering towards the more fancier (read: more difficult and not necessarily better tasting) dishes, Kwak has written up the simple staples of the Korean diet. Each recipe includes all of the ingredients WITH AMERICAN MEASUREMENTS. A lot of recipe books out there use grams and mg, which can get pretty confusing for us with our cups and ounces. The steps are easy enough for an eleven-year old to follow (and I would know because my younger sister proved it), and Kwak also includes a short but personal story about some of the dishes, which is a nice touch.
Interspersed throughout the recipes, she has longer stories of the story behind the cooking on a whole, which makes the cookbook more than a smattering of recipes; it is a memoir. Though I haven't counted how many there are in all, it is enough to fill roughly 130 pages. I can say that I've bookmarked at least 90 percent of them. The couple that I've dabbled with so far came out great, even if I botched up the recipe just a little.
In my overall opinion, Kwak has put together a fantastic book that couldn't be easier to follow and I haven't regretted my purchase in the least.
3.0 out of 5 stars below my expectations, July 30, 1999
By A Customer
Being korean-american, I guess my expectations were too high. I thought that since, the authors of this book were korean, that this book would help me hone my korean cooking skills. I was very disappointed because there are not that many recipes contained in the book and also many of the techniques used are not traditional. The recipes turned out okay, but they seemed to be lacking something. The ingredient list and techniques used seemed to be simplified so that they would be easier for nonkoreans. However, for someone who is unfamiliar with korean food in general, there are not enough pictures to help them. There are 8 pages of pictures and six of them contain pictures of finished products.
3.0 out of 5 stars Helpful, but not much, February 22, 2001
By Ann (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
I have been keeping this book for about six months and have tried around 10 recipes from it. I am not Korean but my boyfriend is a native so he can easily tell whether those dishes are authentic or not. After those experience, I feel this book is helpful for beginners, but it oversimplifies Korean cuisine.
Those side dishes aren't so easy to make as they look, believe me. Besides, some recipes are confusing. For example, Kalbi, according to the book, for 1 pound beef short ribs, it only needs 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 2 tablespoons sugar, 2 teaspoon sesame oil and chopped garlic, no salt at all. If you follow this, the beef ribs will turn out to be tasteless. Korean barbecue dishes always have strong taste and need much more condiments. And Yuke-jaong, our favorite, needs much more red pepper flakes than the quantity from the book to get that hot and spicy taste. So I think this is just an OK cooking book, not a great one, though I do love those stories bringing out the culture of this country.
3.0 out of 5 stars Nice, but Not Authentic, June 5, 1999
By A Customer
Dok Suni is a nice Korean cookbook with it's many pictures of the author growing up, the little stories of her diligent mother, the colorful pictures of the food. I wouldn't call it authentic Korean cooking though. The recipes are still very tasty, but don't make these recipes thinking they are what most Korean mothers make for meals.
The recipes are very Americanized and it's a great book to introduce someone to Korean food and cooking. Just don't serve these recipes to someone from the Fatherland and call it "homecooking".
Product Details
- Hardcover: 144 pages
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (October 15, 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312192614
- ISBN-13: 978-0312192617
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
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