Chunjang Is the Korean Pantry Staple That Upgrades Everything From Noodles to Steak Rubs

While chef Matthew Kim, the owner of Los Angeles Korean Italian restaurant Lapaba, was growing up in the Bay Area, he and his mother would frequent the city’s Chinese Korean restaurants, or Hwagyo restaurants. They’d cover tables with bowls of jjampong, a lipstick red seafood soup bobbing with mussels, kkanpunggi, a sweet and sour fried boneless chicken, and jjajangmyeon, a chewy, thick noodle dish topped with a charcoal-black pork and vegetable gravy made with the fermented soybean paste chunjang. 

Decades later, Kim uses those early meals as inspiration for his K-Town trattoria. The spicy, oceanic notes of jjampong echo through the restaurant’s lobster tonnarelli, and the fried chicken uses Calabrian chiles as opposed to the dried chiles often used in kkanpunggi. And in an ode to jjajangmyeon, Kim and Lapaba co-owner Mckenna Lelah use chunjang for their bucatini amatriciana, another spicy pork pasta.

Chunjang, the Korean answer to China’s sticky, salty-sweet tianmian sauce, is not just the foundation of jjajangmyeon. Increasingly, American chefs are using the paste as a way to bolster the savory and umami components of sauces and marinades. Its profound black color can help add some drama to a grilled steak or pork chop, and the delicate fermented funk will add oomph to tomato-based sauces, not unlike a splash of soy sauce, Maggi seasoning, or Worcestershire. We asked three Korean chefs around the country for their tips for using chunjang in everyday cooking, beyond the classic bowl of jjajangmyeon.

What is chunjang?

Chunjang is a salty, fermented soybean paste used in Korean Chinese cooking, made by fermenting wheat flour and soybeans. Historically, chunjang relied almost exclusively on fermented soybeans and salt, but over time, commercial chunjang producers began using a combination of flour and soybeans, adding caramel color to help accentuate the paste’s deep ebony shade.

What does chunjang taste like?

When tasted straight from the tub, chunjang can be very salty and even bitter. The magic happens when you fry the sauce in a few tablespoons of oil, which helps temper any sharp notes and adds dimension to the flavor. “Frying definitely aromatizes the paste,” Kim says. “If you just use the paste, it comes off very raw, almost metallic tasting.” 

Once it’s fried, chunjang packs an umami punch, with an undercurrent of sweetness and fermented funk. It’s best to then incorporate a sweeter counter-note, which helps accentuate the molasses-like qualities of chunjang. 

How to use chunjang

Chunjang works well as an aromatic base note in a sauce, not unlike tomato paste, before adding a liquid like crushed tomatoes, stock, or white wine. At Lapaba, Lelah and Kim fry chunjang in guanciale fat for their amatriciana, lending its “concentration of flavor and extra umami,” says Kim. “It just rounds out the pasta, almost compacting the flavor in each bite.”

At New York’s Sono, chef Sechul Yang does less of a direct swap, and instead pairs ‘nduja, the Calabrian spicy pork paste, with chunjang as the foundation for a pasta dish somewhere between a Bolognese and a jjajangmyeon. “In Italy, everyone likes Bolognese. In Korea, our version of that is jjajang,” says Yang. He uses lumache noodles, wide curled tubes named for the shape of snail shells, to trap little bites of pork and vegetables in his sauce. “For the jjajang, they always cut the vegetables and the meat too large,” he says. “So I use a shorter noodle, and then I can have them all in one bite.”

At chef Peter Cho’s Portland, Oregon restaurants, Jeju and Han Oak, chunjang is a regular component of marinades, and once appeared in an early fried chicken glaze. He blends chunjang with black garlic for a steak rub, the latter providing a touch of caramel sweetness without hewing too saccharine. In general, Cho suggests tempering chunjang’s salty punch with some sort of sweetener, like Korean rice syrup or even corn syrup. But Cho’s biggest piece of advice: “a little goes a long way.” Start with a teaspoon in a sauce, and go from there. 

Where to buy chunjang

At the moment, chunjang doesn’t have quite the supermarket ubiquity of, say, gochujang, which now sits in the “international” aisle of any Kroger-esque grocery store. Instead, you’ll have to wander through an East Asian grocery chain like H Mart or 99 Ranch. You’ll find it near the gochujang or doenjang in a Korean pantry aisle, sometimes labeled “jjajang” or “black bean paste.” In parts of the country without accessible East Asian markets, home cooks can order jars from online markets like Hanyang Mart or Yami.