JANGIN Stories - Kimchi Is a Warm Heart

Kimchi Is a Warm Heart 

On Park Kwang-hee, Pyeongchang, and what sincerity tastes like By Nadia Cho 

There is more content about kimchi in the world than anyone needs. 

This is not a complaint. It is simply the context in which I had to make a decision. When the executive producer and I agreed that the second episode of Eater's Handmade series would focus on kimchi, the question was never whether to make it. The question was who. 

There are kimchi masters all over Korea. Many of them are extraordinary. Many of them have already been filmed, written about, celebrated - and rightly so. I did not want to add another well-lit video to a category that was already full of well-lit videos. I wanted to find someone whose kimchi told you something the others didn't. 

My friends in food journalism call me the kimchi litmus test. I do not disagree. Whatever restaurant I walk into in Seoul, the first thing I reach for is the kimchi. It tells me everything I need to know about the kitchen - the attention, the patience, the philosophy of the person who made it. I have strong preferences. I lean toward the lighter, cleaner kimchi of Seoul and the northern regions - refreshing, not heavy, without the intensity of the salted seafood that dominates further south. It is a preference I have held for years without apology. 

Park Kwang-hee's kimchi from Gangwon Province changed nothing about that preference. And yet it stopped me completely. 

I had tasted it through the kind of introduction that matters most in Korean food culture - passed along by someone who knew someone, no ceremony, just the thing itself arriving in front of me. I tasted it and understood immediately that something different was happening. It was not Seoul-style, not southern-style. It was something else: singular, careful, made with a sincerity you could taste without being told to look for it. 

I found her contact through persistent inquiry. This is always how it works. 

Pyeongchang is approximately three hours north of Seoul by car. The drive takes you out of the city, past the suburbs, and eventually into the kind of mountain landscape that makes you forget you were ever in a metropolis. Mama Park's farm sits at 700 meters altitude - high enough that the temperature difference between day and night produces napa cabbage with a particular firmness and sweetness that lower-altitude growing cannot replicate. 

She met me at the entrance of a small mountain village I might not have found without directions. The air was different. The pace was different. 

Before any camera was involved, we sat together and I explained the concept. This was not a tutorial. We were not trying to teach people how to make kimchi. We were trying to show who she was - the philosophy, the material, the accumulated knowledge of someone who had spent decades learning to make a single thing extraordinarily well. 

She listened carefully. She agreed. And then, with the warmth that has made people call her Kimchi Mama for as long as anyone can remember, she proceeded to want to show me absolutely everything. 

I did not stop her. 

Mama Park's chili peppers are de-stemmed by hand. Every single one. Not because a machine cannot do it - but because only by hand can you detect the ones with mold, the ones that will ruin a year's worth of fermentation if you miss them. She showed me how the market processes peppers differently. She explained, without drama, that the difference in that one step accounts for much of the difference in flavor. It takes six hours for a single batch. She does not consider this remarkable. It is simply what the work requires. 

She grows her napa cabbage herself. At 700 meters, the cold nights concentrate the sugars in a way that flat-field farming cannot. She knows this not from theory but from thirty years of eating the difference. Her hands move through the leaves the way you move through something familiar - without looking, without hesitating. 

She was selected in a kimchi contest in 2002. She had been running a restaurant for a decade before that. The contest, she said, was accidental. What happened afterward was not. Someone recognized what she was doing, made her an offer, and she spent the next decades building something that now ships to Brazil, Japan, the United States, and anywhere else in the world where someone wants to know what kimchi made with genuine care tastes like. 

She has developed sixty to seventy varieties. The one I did not expect was the dandelion kimchi - harvested from the wild growth around her property, prepared without brine because the fibers are too delicate to survive it. Mama Park believes she was the first to commercialize it. She says this with quiet satisfaction, not pride. 

Filming ended around six in the evening. We had to return to Seoul. There was a schedule. 

Mama Park insisted we eat before we left. 

The table held beef barbecue and more than ten types of kimchi. I say more than ten because I lost count. My staff - people who film food professionally, who have sat at extraordinary tables in extraordinary places - ate in a silence that was not awkward but reverent. The kind of silence that descends when food is so good that conversation becomes an interruption. 

I have thought about that meal many times since. 

It is always surprising to be reminded how many kimchis there are. The variety does not diminish with familiarity - it deepens. Each one carries a specific decision about flavor, fermentation time, ingredient ratio. Each one is an opinion about what matters. Sitting at that table, working through variety after variety, I felt the breadth of a tradition that contains multitudes and still produces, in the right hands, something completely individual. 

After the Eater episode aired, orders came in from around the world. I heard, eventually, that people were flying to Pyeongchang from Brazil, from the United States, from Japan - not just to buy kimchi, but to learn from her. I felt something I can only describe as private pride: the satisfaction of having pointed a camera at someone who deserved to be seen, and watched the world agree. 

Every time I return to Korea now, Mama Park sends kimchi to wherever I am staying. It arrives without announcement. It is simply there - the same careful work, the same mountain air in the leaves, the same sincerity that made me stop the first time I tasted it. 

This is what she told me, near the end of filming, about how to make kimchi properly: 

People can taste the effort. They can taste whether you made it with your soul or without it. 

She said it the way someone says something they have known for so long it no longer feels like wisdom - just fact. 

House of Jang was not built on technique. Technique is learnable. What cannot be taught, and cannot be faked, is the decision to do the work properly when no one is requiring you to. To de-stem the peppers by hand. To grow the cabbage at altitude. To put something of yourself into the jar and trust that the person who opens it will feel it. 

That is what Mama Park does, every time, in a small village three hours north of Seoul. 

Kimchi is a warm heart. 

We learned that in Pyeongchang.