And...my favorite!

Gochujang, my favorite Korean sauce, can be eaten with almost anything.  Although red peppers were first introduced in Korea by the Japanese during Hideyoshi’s invasion of 1592, gochujang did not exist until the later 1700s and 1800s. 

   The exact taste of this paste differs between chefs (Korean moms in this case) and between the times you make it.  Korean cuisine is heavily dependent on the season.  The population, mostly farmers, kept their food preserved by adding lots of salt.  As such, winter foods were more commonly saltier than summer foods which were fresh.  Another factor for the differences in taste is how the meal is prepared.  Usually Koreans cook not by precise measurements and calculations, but by feel.  This can either turn out beautifully, or quite terrible, which I have experienced as my mother’s personal taste tester.  

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   Gochujang is mainly a paste made of red hot peppers, glutinous rice powder, and a soybean paste; sugar is sometimes substituted for the rice powder.  Some may say the paste is more spicy than sweet, and others may say it’s more sweet than spicy.  Again, the taste changes every single time you make it.  Although I prefer my gochujang sweet, there are times where spicy gochujang is all I want. 

   This paste goes into a lot of the Korean cuisine.  A very common dish that incorporates this is called bibimbap.  This is a dish that pretty much uses any and all of the left over dishes that Koreans have lying around.  Usually it consists of rice, sprouts and other greens, sesame, sometimes meat, and gochujang.  Although some may disagree, I think that the gochujang is the key ingredient that determines the quality of the bibimbap and ties all the separate ingredients together.