Kimchi Jjim Recipe: The Slow-Braised Kimchi Dish SEVENTEEN Served at Their Own Restaurant
Here is a Korean dish that almost never shows up on English-language K-food lists, and I have never understood why.
Kimchi jjim. A whole head of sour, aged kimchi laid over a slab of pork and braised low and slow until both of them quit fighting and turn into something you can cut with the edge of a spoon. In Seoul it is ordinary lunch. It is what you order when you want to be taken care of. Outside Korea? Barely anyone mentions it.
SEVENTEEN put it on an actual menu. In December 2021, S.Coups and Jeonghan spent three episodes of GOING SEVENTEEN running a restaurant called SVT’s Kitchen on the group’s official YouTube channel — cooking, serving, and absorbing some of the most brutal reviews any idol has ever received from twelve coworkers. Kimchi jjim was on the board. And in April 2026, when the official channel dropped a 92-minute compilation of nothing but SEVENTEEN eating, the very first thing on the timeline was samgyeopsal, scallion salad, and kimchi jjim.
So let’s cook it properly. Here is the version I make, with substitutions for anyone shopping at a regular supermarket outside Korea.
The SEVENTEEN Story: Three Episodes of Suffering, One Pot of Kimchi
▶️ [GOING SEVENTEEN] EP.34 둘이서 셈식당 #2 (SVT’s Kitchen for Two #2) © SEVENTEEN / PLEDIS Entertainment
The setup was pure GOING SEVENTEEN cruelty. The whole thing was billed as a “hardship project” for S.Coups and Jeonghan, tied to that season’s running theme about watching what you say. The two of them had to run a real restaurant end to end. No staff. No safety net. Just a kitchen and eleven incoming critics.
Their working styles told you everything. S.Coups could not move without a written recipe in front of him. Jeonghan cooked entirely by feel. If you have ever shared a kitchen with someone, you already know how that goes.
Episode one went out on December 1, 2021. Korean coverage at the time zeroed in on Vernon, who took one whiff of the rice the pair had made and told them, to their faces, that it smelled like something no human could eat. Mingyu got roped in as an emergency assistant. Seungkwan was drafted on the spot.
Episode two, a week later, is where the kimchi jjim shows up. The official episode description literally opens mid-joke about the origins of this kimchi jjim, with a member asking to take just one bite before the story starts. The rest of the group split into three review teams, each one parodying a different Korean food show — Joshua, Woozi and Dino inventing straight-faced origin myths for every dish; Hoshi, Wonwoo and DK doing exaggerated flavor commentary; Mingyu, Seungkwan and Vernon running a mock version of the restaurant-rescue format.
By episode three the reviews had gone fully feral. Wonwoo demonstrated his personal technique of eating ramyeon wrapped in gim. Seungkwan and Vernon reported that the broth tasted like ramyeon-flavored crisps, that the meat was tough enough to feel like eating it raw, and, generously, that the whole experience was innovative. Mingyu, who had spent the day washing and prepping as a part-timer, confirmed at the end that yes, this had indeed been a hardship project.
Here is the thing though. Kimchi jjim is hard to ruin. That is the entire appeal of the dish. Two idols with no restaurant experience, one of whom refuses to measure anything, still got something edible out of a pot of aged kimchi and pork. Which brings us to why this recipe is the one I hand to people who say they cannot cook Korean food.
Kimchi Jjim vs Kimchi Jjigae: The Mix-Up Almost Every English Recipe Site Makes
Search “kimchi jjim” in English and roughly half the results will hand you a kimchi stew. They are not the same dish, and the difference is not a technicality.
Jjigae (찌개) is a stew. Lots of broth. Kimchi chopped into bite-size pieces. Tofu, sometimes. It bubbles for fifteen minutes and you eat it with rice, spooning liquid over the bowl. The broth is the point.
Jjim (찜) is a braise. Barely any liquid. The kimchi goes in whole — a full head, stem still attached — and stays whole for the entire hour. Nothing is chopped until it hits the table, where someone cuts it apart with kitchen scissors. The kimchi is not an ingredient in the sauce. The kimchi is the dish.
That one structural difference is why they taste nothing alike. Jjigae is sharp and hot and immediate. Jjim is deep, sweet-sour, almost mellow, because an hour of low heat takes the aggression out of aged kimchi and turns it into something closer to a braised cabbage.
Ingredients (serves 3–4)
The substitution column is the part that matters if you are shopping outside Korea. I have cooked this in three countries and every one of these swaps has been tested in a real kitchen.
| Ingredient | Amount | No Korean market? Use this |
|---|---|---|
| Aged sour kimchi (묵은지) | 1 whole head, ~600g, uncut | Regular napa kimchi left sealed on the counter 2–3 days until it smells sharp and fizzes when opened |
| Pork shoulder or belly | 450–500g, in 2 thick slabs | Pork butt roast cut into chunks; supermarket “country-style ribs” work beautifully |
| Kimchi brine | 1/2 cup | 1 tbsp fish sauce + 1 tsp sugar + 1/3 cup water |
| Rice water (쌀뜻물) | 3 cups | Low-sodium chicken broth, or water + 1 tsp rice flour |
| Gochugaru | 1 tbsp | 2 tsp sweet paprika + 1/2 tsp cayenne |
| Gochujang | 1 tbsp | 1 tbsp white miso + 1 tsp sriracha + 1 tsp sugar |
| Soup soy sauce (국간장) | 1 tbsp | Regular soy sauce, same amount |
| Onion / garlic / scallion | 1 onion halved, 6 whole cloves, 1 large scallion | Leek whites instead of Korean daepa |
| Sugar | 1 tbsp | Half a grated apple or pear (better, honestly) |
| Perilla seed powder (들깨가루) optional | 1 tbsp | Ground toasted sesame seeds |
Step-by-Step
- Do not cut the kimchi. Lift the head out of the jar whole, shake off the excess, leave the stem intact. If it is so sour it makes your eyes water, rinse it once under cold water and squeeze gently. Otherwise leave it alone.
- Sear the pork. One tablespoon of oil in a heavy pot over medium-high. Brown both slabs, about 3 minutes a side. You are not cooking it through — you are building the fond on the bottom of the pot.
- Lay the kimchi on top, whole. Drape it over the pork like a blanket. Tuck the onion halves, whole garlic cloves and scallion around the edges.
- Season and add liquid. Kimchi brine, soy sauce, gochugaru, gochujang and sugar go in around the sides, not on top. Pour in the rice water until the kimchi is about three-quarters submerged. It should not be swimming.
- Boil hard for 5 minutes, then drop it right down. Lid on, lowest flame your stove will hold, 50 to 60 minutes. Check once at the 30-minute mark. Do not stir it.
- Lid off, 10 to 15 minutes. Let the liquid reduce until it goes glossy and clings to the kimchi instead of pooling. This is the step people skip and it is the step that makes it jjim instead of soup.
- Rest 10 minutes, then cut at the table. Scissors. Straight into the pot. Slice the kimchi across into strips, cut the pork into thick coins, and let everyone build their own bite. Rice on the side, non-negotiable.
🇰🇷 How Koreans Actually Eat It
▶️ #꼼잉집 EP.3 — SEVENTEEN’s official 92-minute eating compilation opens with samgyeopsal, scallion salad and kimchi jjim © SEVENTEEN / PLEDIS Entertainment
A few things about kimchi jjim that no recipe card will tell you.
It is lunch food, not dinner-party food. In Korea this lives in baekban territory — the set-meal restaurants clustered around office districts and university gates, where 9,000 won gets you a pot, a bowl of rice, and five or six side dishes you did not order. Nobody makes a production out of it.
The scissors are the ritual. Cutting the kimchi at the table, in front of everyone, is half the pleasure. It also means the person doing the cutting decides how big your pieces are, which is a small power that Korean families take surprisingly seriously.
The pork fat is not optional and nobody apologizes for it. The sourness of the aged kimchi exists specifically to cut through it. Lean pork in a kimchi jjim is a category error.
Leftovers are the actual goal. Day two is better. Day three you chop the remainder, fry it with rice and a fried egg, and you have kimchi bokkeumbap that tastes like it took effort.
It is a “mom made this” dish. Which is why it shows up on idol variety shows so often. It reads as home, as comfort, as the opposite of the road. That is a big part of why the SVT’s Kitchen episodes landed the way they did.
🇰🇷 The Korean Side / 🌍 The Global Side / 📊 The Gap
Kimchi jjim is unremarkable in the best possible way. It is on the wall of thousands of lunch spots. There is a specific restaurant in Seodaemun that Koreans treat as the reference version, and arguing about whether it is still as good as it was ten years ago is a genuine national pastime. When SEVENTEEN cooked it on camera, Korean outlets did not write about the dish at all — they wrote about how funny the members were being about it. The food was assumed. The bit was the news.
English-language K-food coverage runs on a short list: tteokbokki, kimchi jjigae, bibimbap, corn dogs, Korean fried chicken, and whatever a drama made viral last month. Kimchi jjim is almost never on it. When it does surface, it is usually labeled “kimchi stew” and given a jjigae recipe, which produces a completely different dinner.
It comes down to what travels. Dishes that export well are fast, photogenic, and street-food shaped. Kimchi jjim is an hour of low heat in a covered pot and it looks, frankly, like a brown pile. It does not photograph. It does not fit a 30-second video. So it stayed home — even while it quietly remained one of the things Koreans eat most often. If you want to know what Korean people actually eat rather than what Korean food is marketed as, this is a much better place to start than tteokbokki.
Jamie’s Tips (a.k.a. Where This Goes Wrong)
Four failure points. I have personally hit all of them.
1. You chopped the kimchi. Then you made jjigae. It will still taste fine, but the texture that makes jjim worth an hour of your life — long, silky, collapsing strands you cut yourself — is gone. Keep it whole. I cannot say this enough.
2. Your kimchi was too fresh. Fresh kimchi is crunchy and bright and completely wrong here. It will taste thin and one-note no matter how long you braise it. If yours is new, leave the jar sealed at room temperature for two or three days first. When it hisses on opening, it is ready.
3. You kept the heat up. A rolling boil for an hour gives you tough meat and an empty pot. Five minutes hard, then as low as your burner goes. If it is bubbling visibly under the lid, turn it down again.
4. You skipped the uncovered reduction. Ten minutes with the lid off is the difference between a braise and a soup. Do not serve it soupy and then wonder why it tastes weaker than the version you had in Seoul.
Want It in Seoul?
If you would rather have someone else stand over a pot for an hour, two places, both in Seodaemun-gu, which is quietly the kimchi jjim district of Seoul.
Hanokjib Kimchijjim (한옥집 김치찜) — 12 Tongil-ro 9-gil, Seodaemun-gu. The reference point. Pork that comes apart when you touch it, and an egg roll the size of a forearm that everyone orders alongside.
Byeoldang Kimchijjim (별당김치찜) — 2 Myeongmul 1-gil, Seodaemun-gu, near Sinchon. Tiny, cheap, roughly two things on the menu, cash up front, and you are expected to eat and go. Exactly the kind of place I mean when I say this is lunch food.
| Total time | 1 hour 25 minutes (15 active) |
| Difficulty | Easy — hard to ruin, easy to rush |
| Serves | 3–4 with rice |
| Spice level | 2 / 5 — sour leads, heat follows |
| Equipment | One heavy lidded pot. Kitchen scissors. |
FAQ
Is kimchi jjim very spicy?
Less than you would expect. Sourness is the dominant flavor, not heat — the long braise mellows the chili considerably. If you are heat-sensitive, drop the gochugaru to 1 teaspoon and skip the gochujang entirely. It will still work.
Can I make it vegetarian?
Yes, and it is genuinely good. Swap the pork for a block of firm tofu (added in the last 20 minutes so it does not disintegrate) plus a big handful of king oyster or shiitake mushrooms, which give you the meaty chew. One catch: check your kimchi label. Most commercial kimchi contains fish sauce or salted shrimp. Vegan versions exist in most Korean groceries.
My kimchi is not sour enough. What now?
Leave the sealed container out at room temperature for two to three days, then refrigerate. If you are impatient, add 1 tablespoon of rice vinegar to the pot at the start — it is not the same, but it gets you 70 percent of the way.
Can I use a slow cooker or pressure cooker?
Both. Slow cooker: sear the pork first, then everything on low for 4 hours, lid off for the last 30 minutes. Electric pressure cooker: 35 minutes on high pressure with natural release, then sauté mode uncovered for 10 minutes to reduce. The reduction step is mandatory either way.
How long do leftovers keep?
Four days refrigerated, and it improves for the first two. It also freezes well, which most kimchi dishes do not.
💬 Jamie’s Take
I think about the SVT’s Kitchen episodes more than I probably should, and not because of the cooking. Two people who had no business running a restaurant ran one anyway, badly, for three weeks, while their closest friends took turns telling them the food was inedible — and the whole thing reads as affection. That is a very Korean form of love and it is the hardest thing to explain to people who did not grow up with it. Nobody was being cruel. Everybody was being honest, loudly, in a kitchen. Kimchi jjim is the right dish for that energy: unfussy, unbeautiful, made from something that has been sitting around getting sour, and better for the wait. Make it on a Sunday. Cut it with scissors. Argue with someone you like while you eat it.
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