Gochujang: How a Chili from the Americas Became Korea’s Red Heart

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The paste that Koreans call the taste of home is made from a pepper no Korean had seen before the seventeenth century. Capsicum is a plant of the Americas. It reached East Asia on Portuguese ships in the 1500s, and the first Korean book to mention it — Yi Su-gwang’s Jibong yuseol, in 1614 — treated it as a curiosity from over the water. And yet Koreans had been fermenting soybeans, rice, and salt into pastes for centuries before that. The interesting question, then, is not when gochujang arrived. It is what happened when a new kind of heat met an old kind of time.

I think about this most in summer. On summer break I would sit at my grandmother’s house while she came in from her vegetable patch with green chilies still warm from the sun, and she would eat them dipped not in doenjang, the soybean paste most people use, but straight into red gochujang. When I asked whether that wasn’t too hot, she laughed: a chili only tastes right dipped in chili paste. On other days she would tip whatever side dishes were left into a big dented brass basin, spoon in gochujang and a long pour of sesame oil, and mix it all with the rice — yangpun bibimbap. I can still smell it. That is the paste this article is about: not an ingredient, exactly, but a way a family tasted.

The pepper’s long road

Chili peppers were domesticated in the Americas thousands of years before Columbus, and within a century of 1492 they had circled the globe, carried by Portuguese and Spanish traders to West Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. The route into Korea is usually drawn through Japan. The mainstream account places the pepper’s arrival around the Imjin War of 1592–98, when Japanese armies crossed the peninsula, and Jibong yuseol (1614) is the earliest Korean text to describe it. The name that book uses — waegyeoja, “Japanese mustard” — is itself a small piece of evidence about where Koreans of the time thought it had come from.

Not everyone accepts that story. A group of Korean food scientists led by Kwon Dae-young argued in the Journal of Ethnic Foods in 2014 that Korean records of chili and chili paste run earlier than 1592, and that Korea’s gochu may have a longer history of its own. The mainstream reply is that the “peppers” in those earlier texts were almost certainly other hot plants — Sichuan pepper, black pepper — wearing the same name. Same word, different heat. This article follows the mainstream account and notes the dissent, because the honest summary is that the pepper’s exact date of arrival is still argued about, and the paste’s is not.

The recipe gets written down

For its first century in Korea the chili was a garden plant and a medicine before it was a pantry staple. The paste we would recognize as gochujang shows up in writing in the eighteenth century. Somun saseol, a collection of practical notes from the 1720s, records a method for chili paste and attaches a place name to it; Jeungbo sallim gyeongje (1766), an expanded manual of farm and household management, describes a gochojang made by working chili powder into a fermented soybean base. The place both traditions point to is Sunchang, in the southwest, whose reputation for the paste is therefore at least two and a half centuries old. It is fair to call Sunchang the oldest recorded home of good gochujang. It is not fair to call it the first, because nobody wrote down the first.

By 1809, when Lady Yi of Bingheogak compiled Gyuhap chongseo — a household encyclopedia written by a woman for women — the recipe was detailed enough to follow: fermented soybean powder, glutinous rice, chili powder, malt, salt, and the instruction to let it ripen in a jar in the sun. It is not the earliest gochujang recipe; the eighteenth-century texts have it in outline. But it is the first that reads like something you could make on a Saturday.

My own first jar in America was nothing so romantic. I had landed in New York in 2013, and in that first week, when everything was strange and a little frightening, I walked into a small Korean grocery on 32nd Street in Manhattan’s Koreatown — the mini H-Mart, back then — and saw the familiar red plastic tub on a shelf. In a city that seemed to smell only of cheese and butter, the relief was physical, and so was the homesickness that came right behind it. I remember thinking: as long as I have this, I can feed myself here. I bought it. I have not been without one since.

Meju, rice, salt, time

The recipe is also the history, because every ingredient in the jar arrived at a different time. Fermented soybean — meju, the dried block that seeds the paste with Bacillus — is the oldest layer; Koreans were making soybean pastes long before the chili came. Glutinous rice is the sweetness: its starch is broken into sugars by malt enzymes during fermentation, which is why a traditional gochujang tastes sweet without a spoon of sugar in it. Salt is the brake. And the chili, the youngest ingredient, is the one the whole thing is now named for.

Then there is time. A traditional jar sits on a jangdokdae, the raised stone platform behind a Korean house, for months and sometimes years, the lid opened on sunny days and closed against rain. Most gochujang sold in the United States is made in weeks, in stainless tanks, and pasteurized before it is packed, which matters for a question this site takes up separately: what “fermented” means once the microbes are gone.

The science of it

Three things happen in the jar. Enzymes from the malt and from the meju’s molds and bacteria cut rice starch into sugars and soybean proteins into amino acids; that is where the sweetness and the savory depth come from. Lactic acid bacteria and yeasts slowly acidify the paste, which is part of what keeps it. And capsaicin, the chili’s heat, stays put: fermentation does not soften it, which is why an aged gochujang is deeper, not milder. Whether any of this adds up to a health benefit is a different question, with a smaller body of evidence than the marketing suggests. We read that evidence in Is Gochujang Actually Healthy?

At our table today

I will admit something about the tub in my refrigerator now. The export versions that reach American shelves often taste a shade sweeter and a little looser than what I ate in Korea, and I notice it. But the bigger difference is not the brand; it is the absence of home-made paste altogether. In Korea, relatives made it, and it had a rough, deep, slightly funky depth that a standardized tub does not. I miss that more than I expected to. It is also why, this week, we are cooking with the tub we have rather than the one we remember: 15-Minute Gochujang Honey Noodles, the Gochujang Salmon Rice Bowl, and Crispy Gochujang Roasted Chickpeas. Everything we have written about the paste lives on the gochujang ingredient page.

Sources

No interviews were conducted for this article. It draws on the published sources below, which we opened and read; where we could confirm a claim only through secondary references, we have said so.

1. Kwon, D.Y. et al. “History of Korean gochu, gochujang, and kimchi.” Journal of Ethnic Foods 1(1), 2014. sciencedirect.com
2. Jang, D.J., Chung, K.R., Yang, H.J., Kim, K.S., Kwon, D.Y. “Gochujang (Korean red pepper paste): A Korean ethnic sauce, its role and history.” Journal of Ethnic Foods 2(1), 2015.
3. Yi Su-gwang, Jibong yuseol (1614); Yu Jung-rim, Jeungbo sallim gyeongje (1766); Yi Si-pil (attrib.), Somun saseol (1720s); Lady Yi of Bingheogak, Gyuhap chongseo (1809). Dates and contents as given in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (Academy of Korean Studies) entries for each work; we did not consult the original manuscripts.
4. Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices (University of California Press, 2000), on the global spread of the chili after 1492.