Beginner
Korean
Kimchi Jjigae (Kimchi Stew)
Source: Traditional
30 min3420 kcal
Dairy-free🌶️🌶️
Musaengchae (Fresh Radish Salad) · Kim Jin-sun
The banchan-shop radish salad with no salt in it anywhere. The radish is cut as thick as a mandoline will go and drawn out in fish sauce and corn syrup instead — so it seasons while it wilts, and the water you throw away is the only thing lost.
Source
Recipe by 김진순 · 📱 Influencer · Kim Jin-sun — Korean cooking YouTuber, '김진순의 점심시간'; former side-dish shop (반찬가게) owner
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Kim Jin-sun's Lunchtime (김진순의 점심시간) — Published by Kim Jin-sun on her own YouTube channel 김진순의 점심시간 as '반찬가게 사장님들만 알고있는 전설의 무생채 레시피, 제대로 맛 내려면 소금❌', with the full ingredient list and numbered method in the video description. The distinctive point is in the title: no salt at any stage. The radish is julienned at a mandoline's thickest setting and wilted for 10 minutes in a cup each of sand lance fish sauce and corn syrup, whose liquid is then discarded entirely before the sauce goes on.
Cook: 김진순
Watch it being made
⏱ 35 min🍽 10 servings🔥 70 kcal🇰🇷 South Korea🌶️🌶️
Dairy-freePescatarian
Steps
Cut each radish into four manageable pieces.
Using a mandoline set to its THICKEST julienne, cut the radish into batons.
💡 Thickest, not thinnest — she is emphatic. Thin threads of radish go limp and stringy the moment the fish sauce touches them. Thick batons keep a snap all the way through, which is the entire point of 생채 (raw, crisp) as opposed to a pickle.
Put the radish in a big bowl, pour over 1 cup of fish sauce and 1 cup of corn syrup, toss once, and leave it exactly 10 minutes.
💡 No salt anywhere — this is the recipe's headline. Fish sauce and syrup pull water out by osmosis just as salt would, but they leave umami and sweetness behind instead of only salinity. It is why a banchan shop's musaengchae tastes rounder than a home one.
While the radish wilts, make the sauce: combine the gochugaru, 16 tbsp fish sauce, minced garlic, minced ginger, 6 tbsp corn syrup and the MSG in a separate bowl and stir until the chili powder is fully hydrated and glossy.
💡 Let the sauce sit while the radish does. Dry gochugaru needs a few minutes in liquid to swell — mixed in dry, it stays gritty and the colour never blooms.
After exactly 10 minutes, tip the whole bowl into a colander.
Throw ALL of the drawn-out liquid away. Do not save it, do not pour it back.
💡 This is the step people flinch at — you just poured away a cup of fish sauce and a cup of syrup. Keep it and you have a soup, not a salad: the radish has already taken what it needs, and everything left in the bowl is water it rejected.
Return the drained radish to a clean bowl and add all of the prepared sauce.
Toss it thoroughly with your hands until every baton is evenly red, about 1 minute.
💡 Hands, not tongs, and wear gloves. You can feel when a strand is still dry in a way you cannot see, and hands do not bruise the radish the way metal does.
Add the finely chopped green onion.
Scatter over a generous amount of toasted sesame seeds — she says 잔뜩, a lot.
💡 Sesame goes on at the end, after the sauce. Mixed in earlier it soaks up liquid, goes soft and loses the toasty snap it is there for.
Mix once more to distribute the green onion and sesame, then serve. It is ready to eat immediately.
💡 Tips
- Beginner's mistake: salting the radish first out of habit, then adding her sauce on top. You will have double-seasoned it — her fish sauce is doing the salt's entire job, and the result is inedibly salty. There is no salt in this recipe at any point. That is the title.
- Ten minutes means ten minutes. Radish keeps giving up water the whole time it sits — at twenty minutes the batons have gone floppy and no amount of chili powder brings the crunch back.
- Substitution: no kkanari-aekjeot? Myeolchi-aekjeot (anchovy fish sauce) works one-for-one and is a little stronger, so start at about three quarters and taste. Corn syrup can be swapped for oligosaccharide syrup at the same volume. Vegetarian? There is no version of this without fish sauce — it is load-bearing here, not a garnish.
- 1.5 radishes makes a lot — this is a banchan-shop batch and it is meant to be. It keeps about a week in the fridge and gets sourer and better; the day-three version stirred through a bowl of rice with an egg is what she eats in the video.
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