The story behind a Korean-American mom’s passion for cooking

Ro Hyo-sun is a Korean American mother of two who currently works as a government professional specializing in contracting and auditing in Washington, D.C. However, aside from being a full-time worker and a mom, Ro is also a dedicated food blogger.

It started when her two children, who are now grown up and living away from home, wanted to start learning how to cook the food they grew up eating. Her children would call around dinner time asking how to prepare certain dishes. They complained there aren’t enough authentic Korean food recipes available in English. 

“I had already been toying with the idea of compiling my recipes to pass down to my children,” said Ro. “So, the idea of self-publishing and sharing my recipes online sounded exciting to me.”

In 2009, she decided to start up a food blog, titled “Korean Bapsang: A Korean Mom’s Home Cooking,” to share the recipes for the dishes that she had grown up enjoying.

“I never cooked as a child growing up in Korea, but I always took great interest in my mother’s cooking,” she said. “When I was a newlywed, I recreated her dishes to feed my hungry husband. I then realized how much I had learned from my mother simply by watching and tasting her food.”

With her blog, the enthusiastic cook hopes to turn her passion for Korean cooking into a cookbook to be passed on to future generations. She expressed that her biggest hurdle was overcoming her “eyeballing” cooking style.

“As most Korean home cooks do, I have always cooked by instinct and eyeballing, so it is a little bit of a challenge to develop exact measurements and cooking times,” she explained. “For this reason, I test all the recipes as many times as it takes to develop accurate recipes that are easy to follow and produce consistently quality results.”

Ro, whose blog has now amassed more than 100 dishes, will be contributing her recipes to The Korea Herald every week.

“I hope to share the secrets of classic Korean home cooking and some of my other home favorites.”

By Julie Jackson (juliejackson@heraldcorp.com)