Bill Kim

This recipe is very dear to my heart, as it was my first attempt to use ingredients that didn’t normally go together, but made sense to me. In Asian cooking, vinegar is often used to cut saltiness from soy sauce or other ingredients. For me, balsamic vinegar has the perfect mix of sweetness, acidity, and body to combine with the brown sugar and soy sauce here.

This is one amazing steak. It’s simple to prepare and you get maximum flavor in a short period of time. Flank steak is a lean cut, so be careful you don’t overcook it; medium-rare is ideal.

I learned the essence of American barbecue when I worked as a cook in Atlanta, and I still crave that sticky, smoky, tender meat. We capture those memories when we cook with this sauce at our restaurants. With sweetness coming from the brown sugar, kiwi, and pear, plus the sharpness from the onion, soy sauce, and garlic, this sauce has everything you need for barbecue with a Korean touch. I always give credit to my mom for this recipe because she showed me how to make it. Over the years, I’ve made some modifications to take it to the next level, but don’t tell her! She believes that I am still using the same recipe she taught me all those years ago.

Once I married a Puerto Rican woman, my food became what we call a little Korican, and that’s what this sauce is all about. I learned this recipe from my mother-in-law, Dolores Alicea, aka Doe or Lola. Let me tell you, the best Puerto Rican restaurant in town is her house! When I tasted her turkey lechon at our first Thanksgiving together, it was all over for me. The bright flavors, the spiciness from the garlic, the tanginess from the vinegar—everything was new to me. From the moment I tasted her sauces, I knew I had to learn how to make them. I never put vinegar in my marinades until I met Lola, but I understood why cooks put alcohol in marinades, and this is similar: it tenderizes and accentuates the flavors. Now, her cooking is part of my DNA. I had to add it to my arsenal of kitchen techniques, but of course, I made a few changes to kung fu it.

Plain salt is boring! I want more flavor when I season something. When I cooked in high-end French restaurants, I was taught to be restrained in my seasoning. But once I started making my own food, I realized that I didn’t have to follow that rule, and I didn’t have to use plain salt when I could make something with more flavor. This robustly flavored salt is an essential component of how we season food at our restaurants. It helps us build those subtle flavors that you can’t quite identify but know are what make the food so tasty.