This Soup Should Always Be on the Table

Soup rice eases as it goes down. My friend Matt Rodbard, who was a writer of the cookbooks “Koreaworld” and “Koreatown,” calls gukbap a “utility player,” because it can be served in the morning, “for fortifying a hangover or just getting you a solid foundation for the day,” or in the evening with soju, to catch (or extend) the night’s excesses. My father, Ki, who grew up in Seoul and visits there regularly, associates gukbap restaurants with the smell of alcohol emanating from the other diners. If some people have a second stomach for dessert, Koreans have one for gukbap, as reliable as it is ubiquitous, a foundation of daily life. If you grew up in a Korean household as I did, you might not have paused to appreciate gukbap, because it’s just always there, right alongside the napkin holder and the salt and pepper shakers.

Build a life around soup, and you might slowly find yourself healed.

It took me until my 30s to realize how much I had taken my mother’s cumulative hours of boiling homemade stocks for granted. In the United States, standard boxed broths like chicken, beef and vegetable are much too assertive for the kinds of gentle Korean soups that nuzzle you from the inside because they’re so rich in flavor yet light on the tongue. There are no shortcuts to that kind of umami, but there are tricks: Sohui Kim, who wrote “Korean Home Cooking,” taught me to sear beef before boiling it for a stronger-tasting broth. Or if you want the kind of quiet savoriness that only vegetables can lend, turn to her ideal soup meal these days: doenjang guk, with hearty greens like spinach and radish tops. For Joanne Lee Molinaro, the author of “The Korean Vegan Cookbook,” her vegetarian yukgaejang fits the bill whenever she’s craving gukbap, which is often meat-based. The spicy soup’s quintessential ingredient, gosari, the new stems of the bracken fern, shreds beautifully, like meat. Caroline Choe, who wrote the cookbook “Banchan,” adds a little ground black pepper and scallions to gomtang, a beef-bone soup, her go-to for gukbap. Each of these cherished home soups is eaten with a scoop of rice, because on the Korean table, when there’s guk, there’s bap.

This Kim-family gukbap, a Korean American iteration of my mother’s hometown classic, leads with beef and radish, bolstered by a hearty handful of soybean sprouts, which lend both protein and aroma. The brightest, reddest gochugaru you can find, bloomed in the beef fat, results in a tongue-tingling chile oil, pure flavor floating atop the soup.