Kimchi Carbonara Linguine

Pasta carbonara, a bacon-rich Italian favorite, gets a cross-cultural makeover with kimchi, Korea’s national dish.

WE RECENTLY CAME ACROSS A RECIPE for a kimchi carbonara. It sounded like a terrific mashup of one of our favorite Italian dishes and the delicious tangy funk of kimchi, the Korean national dish made with vegetables—often Napa cabbage—fermented for months with various spices. Looking for other recipes for variations to riff on, we came across our own recipe.

Yep, that’s a challenge when you’ve been writing and sharing recipes for almost 20 years. We’ve made so many dishes that we actually forget a lot of things we’ve cooked. Rereading our original recipe from seven years ago, we would happily make it again and eat it right now. Bacon, cheese, eggs, pasta and kimchi, all combined perfectly.

That said, the recipe we recently stumbled on adds one thing we’d happily add to ours: gochujang. Gochujang, Korean chili paste, adds a little heat along with flavor. It is thick, savory, sweet and spicy—and again, another Korean staple. We’ll probably try adding a couple tablespoons of it the next time we make our original Kimchi Carbonara Linguine recipe.