Part One—The First Newsletter
Welcome to my newsletter, Sook! Here is where I’ll be ruminating on and rambling about all things Korean food. Yes, I’ll be sharing recipes but I also want to use this platform to delve deeply into the history of favorite dishes, talk about regional specialties, explore traditional medicine, Buddhism and the concept of five elements as it relates to food. I’ll also be talking about life as a Korean cook and restaurant owner in the US and the ecosystem that our restaurant inhabits and the challenges and joys we experience. The restaurant life musings generally will be reserved for the paid newsletter since there may be some hot takes and I’ll feel more free to be spicy with a more limited audience. Somewhere in the intersection of all the topics I want to discuss (spicy and non-spicy), a newsletter will take shape.
This first newsletter is a mish-mash of what I envision the free and paid newsletters to be. I start with a recipe and I want recipes to be free! But the ramblings after the recipe are more what I imagine will be saved for paid subscribers. And so this is a long one…thanks to those who stick it out until the end!
Part Two—The First Mochi Muffin
I recently posted a black sesame mochi muffin that my toddler son and I baked together. People asked for the recipe, so here it is to kick off my first newsletter! I make a mochi muffin for our restaurant, baroo, that’s based on Hawaiian butter mochi. But for this black sesame mochi muffin, I used the recipe from One Happy Bite’s blog, which was much easier than the one I use. This bake was even easier because I took a shortcut and used Rooted Fare’s Sesame Crunchy Butter instead of making my own black sesame paste. Ease and convenience are key when you are baking at 7am with a three-year old!
Black Sesame Mochi Muffin
(makes 12 muffins)
Ingredients:
320g sweet rice flour or Mochiko (I use Koda Farms Mochiko)
200g dark brown sugar (or whatever sugar you have, though I like the dark brown for extra molasses-like texture/flavor)
10g (2 tsp) baking powder
1/2 tsp fine sea salt
60g unsalted butter, melted (plus extra for greasing your muffin tin)
1 13-oz can of coconut milk
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
200g Rooted Fare Sesame Crunchy Butter (almost the entire whole jar)
handful of roasted white and black sesame seeds, for garnish
Method:
Preheat your oven to 350F. Grease your muffin tin generously with melted butter or neutral vegetable oil.
Mix all of the dry ingredients in large bowl (flour, sugar, baking powder, salt).
Mix all of the wet ingredients in a medium bowl until smooth (all the remaining ingredients except the sesame butter).
Gradually mix in the wet mixture into the dry mix. Keep mixing until fully incorporated. (No worries about overmixing since there's no gluten in the sweet rice flour).
Mix in the sesame butter thoroughly.
Pour the batter into your muffin tin, all the way to the top of each cup. Sprinkle sesame seeds on top.
Bake for 45-55 minutes, depending on your oven. I usually check them at 50 minutes with a cake tester.
Enjoy your mochi muffins!
And enjoy the freedom to call it a mochi muffin! Revisiting the plethora of mochi muffin recipes on the Interweb, I was reminded of the cease-and-desist email that I received in my inbox in 2019 from the CEO of a fellow AAPI business in California. Apparently, this bakery had registered a trademark for the term “mochi muffin” and they threatened legal action if we did not stop using the term. We were selling a baked good we called the Everything Mochi, which we described as a mochi muffin because that’s what it was. It was a butter mochi baked in a muffin tin so it looked like a muffin, the end.
I found this email hilariously out of line. First of all, the fact that someone thought it appropriate to trademark a descriptive term as widely used as “mochi muffin” was laughable to me. I also was struck by the fact that a business that otherwise seemed to be part of our community as an Asian American independent food business would go on the offensive so coldly with us. Perhaps I’m naïve, but I thought if it had been me, I would have said, “hey, you’re probably not aware, but we actually have a trademark for mochi muffin, so could you, maybe, think about changing the description for your dessert”? Though, actually, if it had been me, I would have not trademarked the term in the first place. Lastly, we only sold a couple dozen of these muffins on a good day at what was essentially a temporary pop-up space open only for lunch, so we were hardly a threat to this bakery’s plans of mochi domination.
Anyway, last year, there was a whole flurry of news articles about this bakery’s trademark-based attack on bloggers and businesses referring to mochi muffins, and after they threw their lawyers under the bus, this bakery gave up their trademark. So their website no longer marks Mochi Muffin as a registered trademark, though their homepage still declares that their chef (the CEO who emailed us) created the mochi muffin. Did he create the first mochi muffin? How does one corroborate a claim that someone created the first mochi muffin? What does that even mean?
Part Three – The First Kimchi Fried Rice
The resurfacing of the mochi muffin conflict allowed me and my husband to reflect on ownership in the context of food. Who can own a term like “mochi muffin”? Who can say they were the ones to create a particular dish? And if someone can credibly lay claim to creating a dish, can they or should they claim ownership?
As cooks and creatives, we don’t have a lot of intellectual property rights to what we create. In the US, you cannot copyright recipes even though recipes are essentially our primary assets as a business. So, we can sympathize with the problem of creatives having to deal with copycats.
photo by Graydon Herriott
I can share a scenario with you: My husband, Kwang, started a restaurant, baroo in 2015. His signature dish was named Kimchi Fried Rice, which was given tongue-in-cheek (like all of the names at baroo) since the dish was nothing like the typical, orange-red kimchi fried rice you find in Korean restaurants like our own restaurant Shiku. The baroo kimchi fried rice was a carefully composed dish with basmati rice as the base, topped with a delicately tart pineapple kimchi, pineapple jalapeno salsa, a sous vide egg, housemade purple potato chips, gremolata, gim seaweed and sprinkled with puffed buckwheat and quinoa. Bon Appetit declared baroo’s kimchi fried rice the 2016 Dish of the Year, and Kwang shared an adapted recipe published in Bon Appetit. In late 2018, we had to close baroo and only are just now starting to reopen the restaurant. So that’s the background.
A year after we closed, I learned that a Korean-owned café in Los Angeles was serving what looked very much like baroo’s kimchi fried rice on their menu. I went to the café with a friend to check it out for myself and ordered the dish. It looked like a copy of the baroo kimchi fried rice, but the flavors were lacking and the rice was soggy. One of the owners recognized me somehow, introduced himself with his business card, and sheepishly gushed about baroo and how he hoped I enjoyed their rendition. Nothing on their menu or their social media indicated that the dish was inspired by baroo.
This was an interesting dilemma for me and Kwang. One of our principles for baroo (past, present and future) is that we want to share what we have. And we also believe that imitation is a great (though not the greatest) form of flattery. Kwang was almost more annoyed that the other café’s dish was not a good representation of what he created, as if it gave him a bad name. Except his name wasn’t attached to their dish.
Kwang called up the café owner and said he didn’t think it was right for them to have this dish on their menu. The café owner countered that we had closed. And then gave the defense that the recipe was published in Bon Appetit, so he thought it was okay. What are your thoughts on this? Where we came out was that this recipe was shared for Bon Appetit’s audience of home cooks, so people all over the country could make a baroo dish at home. It’s a different matter for another business to take the recipe, without any modifications, and put it on their menu. And without attribution.
In today’s world, with social media blasting food content at us 24/7, there is beauty in disseminating ideas into the ether, one idea sticking in the mind of someone you’ve never met, and that person unconsciously or consciously using that idea as a springboard to create something entirely new. When we present a dish, we take great pains to credit the chef who inspired the dish – that is, if we are aware that we were influenced by someone. We do try our best to recognize and credit someone’s inspiration because that is an important part of a chef’s legacy. Attribution and honoring what came before is necessary I think. It’s a passing down of knowledge, a dialogue that happens when cooking, whether it’s with a famous chef or with your grandmother. Nothing is created in a vacuum.
Kwang told the café owner that if they had created a new dish, added their own creativity to it, instead of wholesale copied the recipe, that would have been fine. And the café owner said he would change the pineapple to mango. Well, Kwang decided to leave it at that because there was no point in continuing this conversation.
Kwang’s kimchi fried rice was certainly not the first kimchi fried rice. It was not a kimchi fried rice as most people know it at all. He may not even have been the first to make pineapple kimchi or use basmati rice in a Korean-inspired dish – that we don’t know. We do believe that the baroo kimchi fried rice was a unique composition, telling the story of Kwang’s life in Korea, Italy and LA, and rightly was his signature dish. There is a difference between creativity and copycats, even if the law doesn’t recognize culinary creativity. But we would say all of that, of course.
All of this to say, we don’t own our recipes. But if you copy us or a friend of ours, we won’t send you a cease-and-desist letter, but I will come down to your establishment and you will receive a strongly worded phone call from Kwang. So be afraid, very afraid.
If you made it this far, you are a warrior and I am honored. There’s a lot more to say on this topic of ownership and originality but I’ve long since run out of words. Until next week, friends.
xx Mina
Please keep up this good work, Mina!
Will you folks have a book coming out soon?
Allan in WV (and at Shiku, in a couple of weeks! ;-)