Korean BBQ Chicken Skewers

I made kimchi. I made it with my hands and my kitchen and two heads of napa cabbage and an afternoon that stretched into evening because I kept stopping to check my notes, check the video, check myself. The process is simultaneously simple and ancient: you salt the cabbage, you wait, you rinse, you make a paste of gochugaru and fish sauce and garlic and ginger and a little sugar, you spread it on every leaf with your bare hands, you pack it into jars, you wait. The waiting is the part I'm worst at. The part before the waiting — the making, the doing — I can handle. But fermentation asks you to trust a process you can't control or see, to believe that time and bacteria and temperature will do what they've done for thousands of years, and I have trust issues. In general. Not just about kimchi.

My hands were red from the gochugaru for two days. I should have worn gloves — Maangchi says to wear gloves — but I didn't, because I wanted to feel it. The paste between my fingers, the cold cabbage leaves, the slippery fish sauce, the sharp garlic. I wanted the physical memory of making kimchi, even if it stained my skin, even if it meant typing code on Monday with faintly pink fingers that my coworker noticed and asked about. "I made kimchi," I said, and he said, "Cool," and went back to his screen, and the ordinariness of that exchange — the casualness of a white coworker accepting that his Korean colleague made kimchi, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which it is and it isn't — made me smile for reasons he would not have understood.

The kimchi is fermenting on my kitchen counter. Three jars. I check them every few hours, which is too often — fermentation is not improved by surveillance — but I can't help it. I open the jar and smell it: sour, getting sourer, the cabbage softening, the flavors melding. It smells like H Mart. It smells like Hodori. It smells, I imagine, like a kitchen in Busan where a woman I've never met makes this same thing with these same ingredients, and maybe her hands look like mine, stained red, and maybe she checks the jar too often too, and maybe this is the thing that connects us across eleven thousand miles and twenty-two years of silence: gochugaru and napa cabbage and the stubborn faith that time will turn raw ingredients into something nourishing.

I'm being dramatic. I know I'm being dramatic. I'm a software engineer who made a condiment, not a pilgrim who found the Holy Grail. But the thing about making kimchi when you're a Korean adoptee who has never made it before is that it's both — it's a condiment and it's a pilgrimage, it's Tuesday night in a condo kitchen and it's also a reclamation of something that was taken, and holding both of those truths simultaneously is the most Korean-American thing I've done in my life.

Work was productive. The ML pipeline passed its first round of testing, which means my code is actually doing what I designed it to do, and the quiet pride of that — the internal "yes" that comes when a system works — is one of the few feelings I trust completely. Code either works or it doesn't. There's a clarity to that, a binary honesty, that human relationships lack. I've been thinking about why I became an engineer, and I think it's this: in a life where I didn't know who I was, where my origin was redacted and my identity was assembled from fragments, code was the first thing that made sense. Input, process, output. Deterministic. Reliable. Not like parents. Not like countries. Not like the silence where my birth story should be.

Kevin called Thursday. He's doing well — three months sober this stretch, working at the coffee shop, going to meetings. He told me he's been thinking about roasting his own beans, starting a small side project. His voice had a quality I haven't heard in years: enthusiasm without mania. Kevin's enthusiasms have historically been precursors to crashes — he'd get excited about a job, a relationship, a plan, and then the crash would come and the pills would come and we'd be back in the emergency room at 3 AM. But this sounds different. This sounds sustainable. I told him about making kimchi and he said, "Send me some," and I said, "It's not ready yet," and he said, "Neither am I, but we're both getting there."

Saturday: Bellevue. I brought a jar of my fermenting kimchi to show Karen and David. Karen peered at it like a biologist examining a specimen. David said, "It smells... strong." I opened the jar and offered them a taste. Karen tried it — her face did several things in quick succession: surprise, discomfort, interest, and then a diplomatic "It's very flavorful," which is Karen's way of saying it was not to her taste but she loves me enough to eat it. David declined with the excuse that he'd just brushed his teeth, which is not a real excuse but is the kind of gentle dodge that David specializes in. I ate their shares. It's not ready yet — too fresh, too sharp, needs another week — but it's mine. I made it. My first kimchi. The first Korean food I've made from scratch with my own stained hands.

Next week, when it's properly fermented, I'm going to make kimchi jjigae again. This time with my own kimchi. My own aged, sour, funky, Korean kimchi. And this time, I think it'll taste right.

The kimchi isn’t ready yet—it needs another week, maybe more—and I’ve learned enough about fermentation to know that rushing it would ruin it. But the flavors I fell in love with making that paste—the heat of the gochugaru, the bite of garlic and ginger, the umami depth of something fermented and funky—I wanted them again, sooner. These Korean BBQ Chicken Skewers carry that same flavor language: the marinade is built on gochugaru and sesame and soy and garlic, the same vocabulary as my kimchi paste, just in a form I can eat tonight. It felt like the right thing to cook in the waiting: something Korean, something mine, something that doesn’t require trust in bacteria—just fire.

Prep Time: 20 minutes + 1 hour marinating | Cook Time: 15 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 35 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons gochugaru (Korean red pepper flakes)
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon fresh ginger, grated
2 green onions, thinly sliced, plus more for garnish
1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds, for garnish
Wooden or metal skewers (if wooden, soaked in water 30 minutes)

Instructions

Make the marinade. In a medium bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, gochugaru, sesame oil, honey, rice vinegar, minced garlic, and grated ginger until fully combined.
Marinate the chicken. Add the chicken pieces and sliced green onions to the marinade. Toss to coat thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, or up to 8 hours for deeper flavor.
Skewer the chicken. Remove the chicken from the marinade and thread the pieces onto skewers, leaving a small gap between each piece so they cook evenly. Reserve the remaining marinade.
Cook the skewers. Heat a grill or grill pan over medium-high heat and lightly oil the grates. Cook the skewers for 5—7 minutes per side, brushing once with reserved marinade during the first flip, until the chicken is cooked through and caramelized at the edges (internal temperature 165°F).
Rest and garnish. Transfer skewers to a plate and let rest for 3 minutes. Garnish with toasted sesame seeds and additional sliced green onions. Serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Korean BBQ Chicken Skewers — The Korean Kitchen I’m Still Learning to Call Mine