Wow—what a cool cookbook! Growing up Korean American, my family never really ate traditional “American” food. Instead, my mother made mounds and mounds of Korean food—banchan and the works. When I saw this cookbook, I was so excited because it combines my American childhood with my Korean culture. I’m not sure if others will enjoy the introduction part where the author introduces himself and his story, but I really enjoyed it and could definitely relate.
Full disclosure, I haven’t been able to make any of the recipes so far, but I’m already excited to try the gochujang steak and maple syrup spam! The pictures are beautiful, and it was cute seeing the author’s family pictures as well.

I have followed Eric Kim for a while and in the fall of 2021 cooked everything he told me to. I also knew he was working on this book in 2020/21 as glimpses of it showed up on Instagram. I also read every essay Eric wrote online. This cookbook was everything and more than I thought it would be. The recipes are simple and sincere, the stories are thoughtful and inviting. I will never look at Kimchi fried rice the same way again.

Eric Kim has written a Korean American cookbook with heart. Not only are the recipes good, but his family memories enhance the flavors. Savor the stories and the flavors!

This was a great cookbook and I really enjoyed reading through the recipes. I definitely found some that I will be making. I've never tried or made Korean American food so it will be interesting to try some of these.

Cookbooks, for me, always only tend to include 5 recipes that I actually cook. In Korean American, well lets just say that I have about the equivalent of at least 10 cookbooks!

Korean American is broken down into seperate sections: TV Dinners, Kimchi is a Verb, S is for Stew, Rice Cuisine, Korea is a Peninsula, Garden of Jean, Feasts and Korean Bakery.

TV Dinners includes Pan-Seared Ribeye with Gochujang Butter, Maple-candied Spam and Creamy Bucatini.

Kimchi is a Verb includes recipes filled with kimchi galore, like Caramelised Kimchi Baked Potatoes and Spam, Kimchi and Cabbage stir-fry.

S is for Stew has a selection of mouthwatering dishes including Budae Jjgae and Seolleongtang Noodles with Scallion Gremolata.

Rice Cuisine explains how to cook the perfect white rice, as well as giving you recipes such as Gyeranbap with Roasted Seaweed and Capers for you to see put into practice cooking your rice!

Korea is a Peninsula is all about fish. Roasted Lobster Tails with Lemony Green Salad and Pan-Fried Yellow Croaker are some of the delicacy’s that await you here.

For Garden of Jean we have vegetables galore! From Smashed Potatoes with Roasted Seaweed Sour Cream Dip to Grilled Trumpet Mushrooms with Ssamjang, you will love the vegetable based recipes.

Feasts includes Sesame-Soy Deviled Eggs and Lasagna with Gochugaru Oil.

Korean Bakery gives you amazing sweet treats such as Milk Bread with Maple Syrup and Chewy Black Sesame Rice Cake.

All in all, I will probably end up giving every recipe in Korean American a go! It will take me a while but they all look worth-it, and I cannot wait to add these to my repertoire.

If you like Korean food, the Korean American definitely deserves a place on your shelf.

Fantastic combination of food writing and easy to follow recipes with gorgeous photography and good thorough instructions. Pick it up when it comes out!

Beautiful cookbook. I made several recipes from here and definitely will be continuing to use it. I found the recipes easy to follow and delicious and the story parts were engaging and enjoyable. The pictures are stunning and definitely make you want to cook just about everything. For a newbie to Korean-American cuisine, I found it fairly accessible and the ingredients (mostly) easy to find., but I suppose that's the point in some way (his family had to learn to adapt Korean cooking to the American grocery store).

Thank-you NetGalley and Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed Press for the arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Korean American.
If you’re looking for authentic Korean dishes, then you probably didn’t read the title of this book correctly. I’d advice you to close the book or swipe to the title page and then begin reading.
Do NOT skip the introduction because it’s one of the most relatable introductions I’ve read in a long time. It’s the author opening up the doors to his history and not only his kitchen.
This recipe book is wonderful. Korean dishes with the American twist that someone of us that come from immigrant families know very well. I grew up in a Mexican household, so these types of recipes made me think of the ones I had as a kid.
The recipes are easy to follow, and you do get a different perspective on the dish.
The photography is top notch!

I will be adding this to my collection once this is out and trying these dishes out!

This book is beautifully photographed. Everything looks enticing and inviting. Eric Kim's essays alone are worth the cost of admission, but then on top of that you have these easy-to-follow recipes as a bonus! Such creative "remixes" include Smashed Potatoes with Roasted-Seaweed Sour Cream Dip and Cheeseburger Kimbap.

This cookbook drove me mad with hunger. Eric Kim’s writing about his mother’s (and his) creativity in building a culinary bridge between South Korea and the USA is full of life. It reminds us that culturally, food is not monolithic but instead a living, evolving entity. Uncompromising adherence to heritage can entrap and stifle creativity if we aren’t careful.

Really enjoyed this one! The family stories and a look back at his childhood are perfectly paired with delicious Korean American blended recipes. The combination of Korean flavors (seaweed, gochujang, etc.) and American cuisine (baked potatoes, mac & cheese, etc.) feels both new and nostalgic.

The best part is that these recipes are approachable. In fact, it might be a good entry book for new cooks. None of the recipes seem too hard to make even if you're not the most experienced cook in the kitchen! I also love the photography in this cookbook. It's high contrast and different from the usual photos you see in cookbooks — it feels almost like you're flipping through an art book.

I turned to this having tried home-made bulgogi, Korean potatoes, and that ex-royal family-favourite stuffed cucumber dish they gave Trump when he deigned to turn up – a bit like the oi sobagi here. I'm all for the fakeaway and a bit of the echt, now and again, tempered to my western taste at least. And I thought this would match that perfectly – it's not Korean cooking after all, but Korean American. So should you be surprised when the first dish that lit my eyes up was some maple-roasted Spam?!

There is a lot here that you will want to dismiss when coming for a kind of fakeaway quick fix; the author says he always ignores the opening pantry section of books like this, something I'd already started to do with the man's 'journey' here. Some recipes' preambles run to a second page. There are four pages devoted to photos of people doing something despicable-looking in the back garden, that might be making kimchi and might be human dismemberment. Someone's dog is there a lot more prevalent than you'd ever have expected – brave, considering one certain Korean stereotype.

The bigger issue in that regard is that, however, it's not about the fakeaway, the instant, the easy, the adapted-to-the-West. This has much more of the homely, with so much of it coming from the author's mother's mind, and touching as many bases with Korea as possible – America barely gets a look-in. So we're scouring our ethnic shops for different radishes, making as much kimchi as possible – even if we stuff it into a sandwich of the whitest-of-white, western-seeming breads – and rootling around for beef bones, specific leaves, certain forms of dried seaweed and so on. And tinned Spam, of course, which my partner thinks she's never eaten. And varicoloured flying fish roe, which we're both certain we've never heard of before now.

What I thought I'd get was something much more Americanised, and/or perhaps what seems to be menu items from a 'bunsik' snack bar. This is still great, for the right buyer, mind – but do think of this as a heritage cookbook, with the nation's original cuisine in mind. Those family snapshots with the author as a young child are there for a reason, clearly. As a result this is a classy, if very wordy, covetable, heirloom kind of volume – but if the amount of autobiography and editorialising makes you run to a youtube tutorial instead, I would not be surprised.

Fantastic recipe book. Tried a handful of the recipes and all of them were absolutely delicious.
I am a sucker for a good gamja tang, and was amazed to find that when I cooked this recipe it tasted even better than the local Korean restaurant.
I really enjoyed how accessible this book was to those who are not familiar with Korean cooking or ingredients. I have tried other cookbooks in the past and been scared off by the unfamiliar list of ingredients. This book presented the Korean kitchen in a manner friendly to beginners and I will be recommending to friends and family.

This book will become a staple on our shelf, thank you!

For the first time perhaps ever in opening up a cookbook, I actually read the introduction. I know I'm not alone in giving the intro a skim since they all pretty much follow the same basic structure something to the affect of "I'm so excited to share these wonderful recipe memories from visiting my 100 year old grandmother in Italy." But Eric Kim captured an intrinsically relatable moment from the first sentence and before I knew it, I was hanging on every word nodding my head with the deep understanding of having been in that same headspace before. Don't sleep on the first 20 pages of Kim's history with his mother, Jean. Not only are they integral to the recipes ahead, they're simply worth your time. In fact, all of the words that follow are worth the effort too. Even the boring pantry list is brought alive. I think if you could fall in love with a cookbook at first sight without laying your eyes on a single recipe, I just did.

And once the recipes start, Kim starts with an absolute bang - Pan Seared Ribeye with Gochujang Butter. Yes, please. I'll take 5 servings. Can I say I adore how this book is set up? You're not getting recipes divided by appetizer, main, etc. You're getting recipes in a far more logical order: by featured ingredient or style. How simply brilliant is that? How many times do you have an ingredient you want to use and have to use the index to flip back and forth to find the dish that will accommodate? I'm pretty certain that that's the only approach I have in using my cookbooks once I start using them in earnest. Thank you, Eric Kim. Now I can figure out how to use that sheet of gim (Korean seaweed sheet) that's about to expire. Or I can throw together my favorite Kimchi Jjigae (stew) in anticipation of my Covid-Booster recovery. And the recipes themselves are approachable, accessible, and deliciously playful. They're a perfect marriage of classic Korean recipes with some American twists. I cannot wait to try Carmelized Kimchi Baked Potatoes and Cheeseburger Kimbap. And fans of Squid Game will delight in the No Churn Ice Cream with Dalgona Butterscotch Sauce.

This is the first cookbook I've every reviewed for Netgalley where I purchased a hard copy not just for myself but for friends as well before I even finished reading it. If that's not the pinnacle of recommendation, I don't know what is.

Here is the thing: this book made me cry! Most cookbooks don't make me feel quite as much as this one has, but this is overflowing with heart. It is rich with personal stories, gorgeous jeweled tone photos, exciting but accessible recipes, and musings on the world.

This book is such a special glimpse into the life and experience of an immigrant family, specifically from Korea. Here's a little excerpt that I really loved that I feel like summarizes this particularly well: "It's about all of the beautiful things that come from being different, and all the hard things that come with that, too. My hope is that in reading this book, you'll see yourself in it, whether you're Korean, Korean American, or neither, whether your family immigrated to Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Little Rock. Because at the heart of this book is really a story about what happens when a family bands together to migrate and cross oceans in search of a new home."

The book is broken into the following sections:
TV Dinners: fast foods to eat on the couch
Kimchi is a Verb: on time capsules and pantry cooking
S is for Stew: the Korean art of gentle boiling
Rice Cuisine: Jipbap means "home food"
Korea is a Peninsula: The fish chapter
Garden of Jean: the vegetable chapter
Feasts: menus and ruminations on living
Korean Bakery: bakery weekend projects

I learned a lot from this book! It inspired me to start looking at roasted seaweed (gim) as less of a snack and more of an ingredient, to consider making my own kimchi, and helped me gain a better understanding of how ingredients evolve as families cook dishes native to their home in new places. I will note that most recipes in this book contain meat, but I think that is a reflection of Korean cuisine.

Highly recommend this beautiful book - you will be better for reading it even if you never cook a thing.

This book is heart warming not only for its recipes which are great, but for the stories behind them. The recipes feel very authentic and steeped in Eric's family history. I especially enjoyed the section on Kimchi and I will preparing my very first batch this evening while I bake the Broccoli Cheese Rice Casserole also from the book. Living in a small town I would most likely need to visit a specalist supermarket to get hold of some of the ingredients used, but thats a trip I'm happy to make if it means I can recreate some of the amazing recipes in this book.

Highly recommended *****

This is everything and anything you need a cookbook to be. I’m not a huge fan of Korean food, but I AM a fan of hearing immigrant stories. I got some great stories and then particularly enjoyed the explanation of the pantry ingredients since this section helped me understand the recipes. There are definitely some I’d even try making and the accompanying photos are quite appetizing and, again, help the reader to understand just what the dish is.
This would be a wonderful gift for anyone interested in Korean cooking, be they a novice or more experienced. They seem very well adapted to your average cook at home and the steps are clear.

This book has a lot of heart.

More than a cookbook, this book is an exploration of a family growing up with a blended culture and the food that so clearly reflects that. Furthermore, the recipes in here are many of the tried and true recipes that came from Eric Kim’s own mother and is a rich blend of Korean and American flavours.

That said, many of the recipes are labour’s of love of sorts, but there is no denying that the end results are well worth it. For anyone who loves Korean flavours, this cookbook takes those well loved recipes and adds a unique twist. You’ll find everything from tried and true kimchi recipes to cheeseburger kimbap, maple candied spam, soy sauce fried chicken, and much more. The flavour profiles are unique and fun and make this cookbook such a unique one.

As a whole, the pictures in the book are gorgeous, there are lots of fun details that make this such an interesting read (such as the pantry list that truly deserves to be read in full), this book is choked full of heart, and that is to say nothing of the recipes which are a sure standout. Korean American is a very worth it cookbook for lovers of Korean flavours, or for those desiring to experiment anew with recipes you will not find elsewhere.

Thanks to the publishers and netgalley for a virtual arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have been looking forward to Eric's cookbook for quite sometime and it does not disappoint! A joy in it's vision, story, and recipes; there's something for everyone in Korean American.

This book is so fun! A unique perspective with great recipes. Not the best resource for those looking for more vegetarian or vegan recipes, but a good source of inspiration at the least.