Gochujang Scallion Cornbread Recipe with Honey Butter Glaze

I have a long love affair with cornbread. I’ll eat it any way – sweetened, Northern style, or unsweetened as it is in the South – and I’m always the one to finish off my friend’s courtesy slices when we dine at a barbecue joint. I’m clearly not the only one with a deep love of cornbread: whenever it appears on the syllabus for the cooking class I teach, it often disappears faster than anything else we’ve made that day. And every time I bring cornbread dressing to Thanksgiving, it’s the first side to go.

Although it is not widely known, Korea also has a deep connection with cornbread. In the 1960s, as South Korea struggled to recover from the Korean War, the United States provided food aid in the form of cornmeal and powdered milk (among many other foods) in hopes of reviving Korean taste buds and establishing the country as a future export market. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, South Korean schools served oksusu-pang, an oval, hard, grainy cornbread, something that has become incredibly nostalgic for many Koreans.

“Its seemingly unappetizing characteristic of being hard and rough is what makes the bread so unique,” noted Nicole Choi for Roads and Kingdoms in 2015. “Today, the search for this elusive cornbread is ubiquitous among a certain generation of South Koreans,” including popular food blogger Maangchi, who shared a recipe for oksusu-pang on her site in 2015. Although my version differs in terms of texture and flavor of how many others in Korea Remembers, I constantly think about the historical significance of this dish and the freedom I now have to draw inspiration from it.

For this version of my cornbread, I decided to incorporate fresh green onions and gochujang, a sweet and spicy paste made from chili peppers, rice flour, and soybeans. Friends have told me that this cornbread is like a flavorful, moist Johnnycake with both a tangy and umami taste of gochujang, a fermented chili paste.

Although the cornbread contains a little sugar, it’s not too sweet, and a gochujang-honey-butter glaze gives it a nice salty-sweet touch. I like to garnish with toasted white sesame seeds and sometimes serve the cornbread with toasted sesame oil, which gives a welcome nutty note. It’s a great addition to accompany roast meats, fish or vegetables at dinner, and it’s a great gift for those who love spicy pastries.