Top 10 gemmadeealexander.com Competitors

jaehakim.com

[video width=1280 height=720 mp4=https://www.jaehakim.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/kimchi-jiggae-by-Jae-Ha-Kim_substack.mp4][/video] By Jae-Ha Kim Substack (.pdf) July 11, 2025 I am a bit of a weirdo when it comes to my food choices. My son will point out that I am always cold during the winter. But I still add ice cubes to most of my drinks and seek out ice cream. But when it comes to my love of hot (and spicy) stews in the middle of a summer heat wave, I have science to back up my choice. OK, maybe culture is the better descriptor. I don’t know. You tell me. Most of my non-Korean friends find it peculiar that I crave super hot soup when it is 90° out. But it’s not that unusual for Koreans, especially when the soup in question is samgyetang (삼계탕) — a savory and healthy chicken ginseng soup, which is one of South Korea’s go-to meals when it is desperately hot outside. The thought process is that the nourishing soup will restore the nutrients you lose from excessive sweating — kind of like Korean Gatorade, only in soup form (and more delicious). Unlike a lot of Korean food that is shared, each serving of samgyetang is meant to be eaten by just one person. The main ingredient is a young chicken (cornish hen) that’s stuffed with rice, garlic, jujube, ginseng, and whatever else you’d like to add. All of this is boiled in water until it becomes a fragrant soup. The delicious samgyetang (삼계탕) — ginger chicken soup — I had on a boiling hot day in Seoul. It’s especially tasty eaten with kkakdugi (깍두기) — a Korean radish kimchi. I ate samgyetang in Seoul not long ago with a group of people who were unaccustomed to Korean food. Honestly, they didn’t want to eat this soup. It was beige and boring looking. And you could see the steam rising from the bowl. Not exactly what most people think of as refreshing when it’s hot outside. But what the dish lacked in color and pizazz, it more than made up for in flavor. (And I’m convinced it cured my jet-lagged stomachache.)