Han Recipes is a English-language guide to Korean home cooking — the everyday dishes that actually appear on a Korean table, written for people cooking them outside Korea for the first time.
Where these recipes come from
Most sites translate Korean recipes from memory or from other blogs. We start somewhere more solid: the public recipe database published by Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, a government body that maintains standardized recipes with tested quantities, cooking steps, and nutrition data.
That matters for one reason above all — the amounts are real. When a recipe here says 75g of soft tofu, that is the published quantity, not an estimate converted into cups by someone guessing. We keep the original numbers and never re-scale them to fit American measuring spoons.
What we add
A government database entry is accurate but terse. It will not tell you why the radish turns watery, or what to buy when your grocery store has no Korean radish. So each recipe here adds:
- Context — what the dish is, when Koreans actually eat it, and how it fits into a meal.
- Ingredient notes — what to look for, and what substitutes work when the original is hard to find outside Korea.
- The reasoning behind a step — not just “salt and wait 20 minutes”, but what the waiting does and what happens if you skip it.
What we do not add is invented detail. If the source recipe does not specify something, we say so rather than filling the gap with a guess.
Romanization and naming
Dishes are titled with the Korean name first, then a plain-English description — Musaengchae (Korean Radish Namul). The Korean name is what you will see on a restaurant menu or a package label, so it is worth learning; the description tells you what you are actually making.
Who runs this
Han Recipes is published by [Your Name], based in [City, Country]. [One or two sentences about yourself — how you came to Korean cooking, what you do otherwise. Readers trust a person more than a brand, so this is worth writing in your own words.]
Corrections are welcome
If a quantity looks wrong, a step does not work, or a translation is off, please tell us. Recipes are meant to be cooked, and the fastest way to find a mistake is for someone to cook it. Write to us on the contact page.