CHEF PROFILE: JOO WON Claire Kyunghwa Nam

PROFILE: Joo Won

By Claire Kyunghwa Nam

Chef Joo Won loves everything that food and drink bring to his life. A cheerful, warm-hearted, yet sharp and passionate personality, for Joo, being a chef is not just a job, it’s a way of life. It’s therefore essential that it also be fun.

Korean born and raised, Joo has been working as a professional chef for over 15 years in London, U.K. Starting at the Orrery with Head Chef Andre Garrett, Joo then moved to Galvin at Windows to work with the Galvin brothers as an opening team member in 2006, working his way up to head chef in 2013. He led the Michelin-starred Galvin at Windows until 2020.

Joo is now planning to open his own restaurant, Cálong. While the restaurant is dealing with venue issues, he’s planning out a menu of Korean-western twisted dishes to be served in a casual setting. Combining his skillful western trained techniques with native Korean fl avours, Joo has been creating many dishes including his signature Kimchi Risotto.

Indeed, Joo has never hesitated to introduce Korean foods and food culture to a wider audience. Presenting Korean fl avours to Le Cordon Bleu London’s students and designing and serving Korean infl uenced canapes and three course menus for the Winter Olympic Team’s Great Britain Charity Dinner at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum are just a few examples of this. Most recently, Joo was appointed as head chef for the London East Asian Film Festival 2021, creating a special ‘Taste of Asia’ menu for movie goers.

Joo doesn’t hesitate when asked what his favourite Korean fl avour or ingredients are … it’s ‘perilla leaf’ (깻잎 kkaennip). “Such a versatile ingredient full of fl avours, complex aromas and texture,” he says. “You can eat as a ssam (a Korean dish that involves wrapping leafy vegetables around meat), in a soup, or preserved as pickles. There are so many diff erent ways to use it.”

WHERE DID YOU GROW UP:

Born and raised in Busan, South Korea. I hardly left my city until I decided to go to London.

FAVOURITE COMFORT FOOD:

A Korean knife cut noodle soup called Kal guk su. This is a simple, lovely broth and chewy elastic noodle that everyone loves in Korea. There are diff erent fl avours but my favourite is Jang kalguksu, a really hearty, spicy, thick broth with a Korean fermented sauce base called Jang made of Gochujang (chilli sauce), Doenjang (soybean paste) and Ganjang (soy sauce). This is a musthave food when you are travelling around Korea.

FAVOURITE INGREDIENT TO COOK WITH:

Defi nitely pork. My favourite part is pork belly cooked simply over charcoal with sesame oil and salt, wrapped in lettuce with ssamjang. But I equally love every single part of this beautiful animal from nose to tail. It’s so versatile: slow cooked head terrine, soy braised trotter, leg ham, lovely cheek stew, roasted cutlet, and rich Korean off al soup. There is so much fun & fl avours about this ingredient.

BEST CHILDHOOD FOOD MEMORY:

I have many memories of sitting with my family, chatting and eating around a large table. But when I was a little kid I used to cry all the time just because I didn’t want to eat anything and for no reason. I do remember one day my grandmother cooked spicy chicken stew, and it was my very fi rst and earliest memory of food that I thought OMG that is so good! I still remember that light but tasty chicken fl avoured with roasted chilli oil aroma from the broth.

YOUR GO-TO RESTAURANT THAT NEVER DISAPPOINTS:

St. John in London. I just fell in love with the fl avours they create with simple (but good) ingredients. No fuss, just honest cooking with good knowledge and experience. Especially their meat dishes like terrines, off als, roast, seasonal

WHO IS YOUR MOST SIGNIFICANT CULINARY INFLUENCE:

Alain Ducasse and Michel Bras. These two legendary chefs’ style of cooking infl uenced me a lot at the early stage of my career. Attention to detail, daily discipline, chasing excellence, knowledge of ingredients and their use, etc. Their books were always at my bedside, and I think they’re still brilliant.

MUSIC YOU LISTEN TO WHILE YOU COOK:

At home – anything my wife plays. At work – anything that brings good energy like rap, techno, rock, and indie.

WHY AND WHEN DID YOU START COOKING:

I took industrial engineering, but after the fi rst 3 months I realised there is nothing fun at all about it. I still fi nished it because I didn’t have anything else planned. After college I went to a local pastry & bakery institution to learn some skills to earn money (recommended by my mother!), and that was it, I found the spark to initiate an actual direction in my life. I wanted to go to Paris, the mecca of gastronomy at that time, but couldn’t speak any French. So I landed in London, just planning a short couple of years and then eventually moving to Paris. But then I saw that London was stepping up its game in the world culinary scene, especially at my fi rst job, the Michelin starred restaurant. It was brutal but it made me really focus on absorbing everything about cooking. I did nothing else but cook for most of my 20’s, and I have no regrets.

VISION FOR THE FUTURE:

I am over 40 and I would like to start my own establishment. I’d like to move away from fi ne dining and do more relaxed cooking with an easy to approach, aff ordable food and wine menu. Most importantly, I want to off er Korean & British cooking that you cannot fi nd at any other place in the UK. I have plans for other projects, but I need to start and settle our fi rst restaurant project, Cálong, and I don’t want to think about other things until I get this done.

Kimchi risotto

Scan the QR code for Joo’s recipe for Kimchi Risotto

The History of the Indian Paratha

By Amrita Amesur

Pratha, pronthi, parotta or even buss up shut; these are just some of the names for glorious layers of cooked dough.

Native to the ancient culinary traditions of South Asia, the paratha lives in various forms across India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. With ancient trade routes, colonization and the resulting migration of Indian natives, these culinary traditions have travelled and evolved in regions all around the world. From India, to Africa, South-East Asia and all the way to the Caribbean Islands. Often made with a freshly kneaded whole grain wheat flour dough or atta, the paratha is essentially a layered unleavened flatbread. A dough is rolled out, stuffed with a filling or just coated with ghee/oil, and coaxed on a hot flat oiled griddle called the tawa, turning it into a crisp buttery paratha. It acts as a vehicle to carry a variety of sweet, savoury, seasonal and regional fillings. From spiced vegetables to a simple paratha with a smattering of ghee and herbs it is a much beloved and indulgent breakfast staple of the sub-continent. The dish is especially dominant in the bread-basket wheat producing region of North India, and can be the perfect accompaniment to most Indian meals.

Because of its versatility, the paratha has adapted to various formats in these regions and can be found dotted across the sub-continent in innumerable forms, textures and flavours, carrying with it endless hyperlocal possibilities. South-east Asia has roti canai, Kerala boasts gorgeous layers of white flour Malabari parotta. There are tandoor-made buttery kulchas in Amritsar, and Gujarat with its bittersweet methi theplas, and we can’t forget Kolkata’s Mughlai style kheema paratha with spiced minced goat meat. The paratha of each of these regions reflects its unique culinary history, showcases their available produce, socio-economic background and often varies with the seasons.

The manner of eating parathas is just about as diverse as the methods of making them – they can be eaten with pickles, dunked into spicey hot chai, tamed down with creamy yogurt, or elevated with a shmear of all manner of preserves and chutneys. Parathas are wonderful to mop up warm bowls of spicey regional gravies made with vegetables, chick-

Photo credit: supplied

Seasoned aloo

Aloo parantha

peas, meat or beans. Or you can eat them as is.

The textures of a paratha could range between soft and pillowy to almost laminated, crusty and buttery - even a delectable mix of both. A comfort food in its own right, parathas would sit nicely in roadside dhabas, along highways as wholesome meals and even next to crispy-crunchy street snacks and chaat of the metro cities.

Chitrita Bannerjee in her book Eating India: Exploring the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices speaks of her visit to the Parathewali Gali in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. In describing the paratha she says, “Dough is usually rolled out into several layers, each brushed with fat and folded into triangular, square or round shapes and fried in a pan.” Bannerjee writes further that while we associate the paratha with mostly Punjabi and north Indian cuisine, it’s believed to be a close cousin of the poli from Maharashtra and Gujarat.

What she is referring to is the earliest recorded mention of a flatbread of this kind, the puran poli, in the 12th century Sanskrit text called the Mānasollāsa. In a chapter devoted to food, the text speaks of a paratha made with wheat flour that was stuffed with jaggery and gram paste, that is today called the puran poli in Maharashtra and holige in Karnataka. K.T. Acharya in his book, The Story of Food refers to these as an early form of stuffed parathas.

Aloo Paratha

Even the problematic colonization of the Global South by European imperialists has enriched and added to the parathas most beloved of renditions - the aloo paratha. Arguably one of the most popular forms of the paratha, it is made with a mixture of spiced, tempered mashed potatoes and chillies stuffed within layers of wheat flatbread. It is then griddle fried to a golden-brown perfection with dollops of ghee.

This is very much a product of the New World incorporated into traditional Indian origin culinary repertoire. Not native to India but indigenous to the Americas, potatoes and chillies came to India with early Portuguese traders and eventually became large scale commercial crops. The landscape of Indian cuisine now would be unrecognizable without the inclusion of these two items. With potatoes becoming the affordable daily starch vegetable over the course of the last 500 years, its consumption is now very much a part of daily Indian cooking. Particularly, in the context of the aloo paratha, it now has cult status. The aloo paratha can be found being made within tandoors in dhabas along the national highways of India, as much as at home on a stovetop tava.

Recipe and Technique

The key to an excellent aloo paratha is a similarly excellent aloo filling. Since it must be filled within a dough casing, the aloo filling would necessarily need to stand up in terms of flavour and spice to be able to taste it through the dough and not seem underwhelming.

Universally, most recipes would involve mashing boiled potatoes and seasoning them with a bunch of spices before stuffing it into rolled out flat breads. While that would be perfectly delicious, I would recommend you go the extra mile to enhance and elevate the aloo filling masala in question. The technique

Stuffi ng aloo paratha

I propose (one that my mother came up with) involves actually sauteeing the mashed potatoes in a hot wok with a beautiful tempering of cumin and minced green chillies. Truly a case of a few ingredients turned into something extraordinary with just a bit of care. The recipe I propose involves three main components – potatoes, chillies and a tempering of desired spices. You really need nothing else if these components are well treated.

All this means is that you roast the mash in a bit of tempered oil, stirring and scraping soft roasty bits from a highly heated wok. More importantly, you also cook and bloom the dry powdered spices added to the mash, which would otherwise remain in their raw and un-activated form. There are few things worse than uncooked dusty dry spices.

This process turns the potatoes from a fair mush to a golden brown, developing a thin delicious crust from the heat of the hot wok – the process we refer to as bhuna in Hindi. The said mixing and scraping also activates starches in the potatoes, making them fl uffi er, smoother, and more cohesive. As the potatoes bhuno, you add in the dry powdered spices along with salt. Maybe some crushed red chilli fl akes and something tart to balance the spice – dry mango powder is delicious, perhaps some black salt to fi nish, and maybe even sumac. Once done, this aloo masala would be decanted, generously showered with chopped cilantro and left to cool off in a corner.

Could you do a tempering of fennel seeds instead of cumin, with dried red chilli fl ake instead of fresh green chillies? Of course. Could you add sumac instead of dried mango powder? Absolutely. Make it yours, with the spices and tart elements you most adore added to the potatoes.

With this method you will end up heightening the fl avour of the potatoes tenfold and also ensure that your spices are actually cooked through, activated, and not just thrown in raw. Since the fi lling goes inside a rolled-out roti, the fl avours of the fi lling mute down, which is why they have to be powerful enough in themselves to stand out despite being covered inside a roti. This technique is entirely game changing, based on the understanding that unless your potato stuffi ng is fantastic, the paratha cannot possibly be. If we wouldn’t eat plain mashed potatoes with raw spices dusted in as is, then we shouldn’t be using it as our stuffi ng.

Amrita Amesur is a corporate lawyer who is deeply passionate about food. She has spent the last year dedicatedly studying and documenting all of her family’s food experiences, while learning to develop her own voice as a cook and a writer. Her favourite comfort food is ghee idli podi and her go-to restaurant that never disappoints is Café Madras in Bombay.

Scan the QR code for Lata Amesur’s (Amrita’s mother) aloo paratha recipe.