Pajeon, those crisp-edged, scallion-filled Korean pancakes, are delectable in any weather. But it’s on rainy, blustery days, when the skies seem bleak and the air feels damp, that the chef Sohui Kim craves them the most.
Ms. Kim, an owner of Insa and The Good Fork restaurants in Brooklyn, told me this as she was walking down the streets of Red Hook. It was drizzling, and I could hear the wind howl through her cellphone.
“I could use one now,” she said. “I need something comforting and crispy.”
I got hooked on Ms. Kim’s seafood pajeon at Insa, where its crunching sounds markedly improve the karaoke renditions of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” or at least drowned them out.
When she told me the pancakes were easy enough to make on a weeknight, I begged her to tell me how.
“If you think about the sweet pancakes you make in the morning, it’s the same thing,” she said. “You can throw anything in the batter — blueberries, apples, chocolate chips. When you turn the whole notion savory, the possibilities are limitless.”
Ms. Kim, who lived in South Korea until age 10 when she moved the United States, learned how to make the pancakes, called jeon, from her mother. (“Pa” means scallions and is added to the word when they’re tossed into the batter.)
“My mother would use whatever was available,” she said. “Sometimes she’d grate zucchini and throw it in with kimchi juice, or she’d use mushrooms or edible roots.” (Ms. Kim is partial to jeon made with leftovers like brussels sprouts.)
Most important, she said, is to finely chop or shred raw vegetables, so they cook quickly in the batter. Precooked vegetables and seafood can be cut into bite-size pieces. Then, shallow fry the pancakes in just enough oil to coat the pan in a thin layer, but not more. These are pan-fried, not deep-fried, and you don’t want them to get greasy.
Ms. Kim mixes potato or other starches into the batter to give the jeon a slightly sticky chew. She adds baking powder for lightness. But her mother sometimes won’t bother with either. Like recently, when the two were making kimchi jeon together, and her mother used only kimchi, flour and water.
“I said, ‘Mom, let’s jazz it up,’ ” Ms. Kim recounted. “But she said: ‘I’m too tired. Let’s just eat it.’ ”
“And you know what, it was great.”
Recipe: Vegetable Pajeon (Korean Scallion Pancakes With Vegetables)
