Maangchi, the internet’s Korean mom

Maangchi was already a cult figure when she published her first cookbook in 2015. Now, with the release of her second book, Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking, she’s practically a YouTube legend. Here’s a particularly impressive example of her influence: her dakbokkeumtang recipe was recently featured in a Bon Appétit video series where a food editor reverse-engineers famous chefs’ recipes by smell, touch, and taste alone. In her monthly newsletter, Maangchi summarizes the video: “They didn’t even tell him what food it was, but he tasted it blindfolded, guessed what it was and then recreated it. You know, what I was surprised about was that he said it tasted like ‘something from Maangchi!’”

Since Maangchi (real name: Emily Kim) started her channel in 2007, she’s uploaded hundreds of recipe videos, demystifying Korean food for a global audience. The “global” part isn’t an exaggeration: as soon as she uploads a video, international fans get straight to work, translating her videos in up to 50 languages. Her videos make cooking accessible for everyone, guiding home cooks every step of the way. And she does it all in a gentle, good-humored style that’s led fans to call her “mom,” a phenomenon she noticed starting a few years ago. “I love it. When you think, ‘Oh, she’s like my mom. She reminds me of my mom,’ it’s the best compliment,” she tells me.

For years, fans have been tuning in for her. She’s a comforting presence in her consistency, giving viewers the things they know to expect from a Maangchi video: her signature greeting, “Hello, everybody!” in her thick, endearing Korean accent. Glitzy outfits, complete with elaborate headpieces. The occasional text that pops up on-screen to give personalities to the ingredients she cooks with. (“Oh, we are good looking anchovies! :)”) But most importantly, it’s the fact that she’s an authority figure on Korean cooking — a real ajumma, a term of affection for middle-aged Korean aunties — that makes her so appealing.

It’s a relief when I meet Maangchi at a Starbucks in Manhattan and discover that her real-life persona is pretty much exactly as we see her on the internet. She walked in wearing white platform stiletto heels, and after giving me a warm hug, she ordered a caramel Frappuccino with whipped cream. When her drink came out, I regretted not living with the same vigor for life, looking pitifully at my watery iced latte.

In her new book, Maangchi writes about how her videos have helped everyone from Korean adoptees who yearned to learn more about their cultures to families who have lost mothers and were brought together by food to non-Koreans who started businesses and restaurants with her recipes. Her Twitter feed is filled with retweets of her followers’ faithful re-creations of her recipes, and her monthly newsletters are full of praise and positive encouragement for her viewers. She writes of a reader’s rendition of her recipe: “Once I saw Brigitta’s kimchi pancake photo on her Facebook, I had to make it myself because it looked so delicious! Many people tell me that I inspire them to cook but I’m also inspired by my readers like Brigitta.”

Maangchi’s videos have struck a particular connection with immigrants like herself who are homesick for the meals they grew up with. I discovered Maangchi one night in college, idling about in my first apartment in San Diego, when I had a sudden craving for some Korean food. It was 2007. I didn’t have a smartphone yet, so getting the recipe from my mom in Korea meant I had to dial an obscene amount of numbers through a phone card to make international calls. I wondered if there was an easier, more visual way to learn, so I typed in “kimchi jjigae” on YouTube and found her videos.

There was no question of whether the recipe would be authentic. The fact that she was an ajumma meant she was automatically trustworthy. I watched her cook everything from scratch — gimbap, tteokbokki, soondubu — meals I’d taken for granted and never bothered to learn how to make when I had the chance. To have step-by-step video tutorials on how to make all of the food that reminded me of home was a revelation. Immediately, it felt like a door had opened from my San Diego kitchen to my mom’s home-cooked meals, making the distance feel more manageable. In the weeks that followed, I would take photos of all the stews and banchans I made and email them to my mom as proof: “Look, I’m not starving in college. I’m eating well. Everything’s fine!”

Before Maangchi found her calling on YouTube, her first exposure to an online community was through the MMORPG City of Heroes, which she played obsessively when she was living in Canada. By day, she worked as a family counselor; by night, she was engrossed in her virtual world, leveling up her characters and maxing out their stats. She excitedly recalls logging on after work to play for hours with her internet pals whose names and phone numbers she still keeps to this day. “My job was usually Attacker. I just always wanted to be wielding my sword and hammer,“ she says. Once, she was scammed out of some virtual money. She managed to track down the player to confront him online and found out he was just an eight-year-old kid.

She kept up her day / night routine for three years, sometimes playing until she was so dizzy she had to rest, until, one day, her adult son suggested that she channel her energy into something healthier, like a YouTube channel. “Maangchi,” meaning “hammer” in Korean, was the name of one of her characters that she liked to dress up in “sexy costumes” whenever she had enough virtual money. If she had chosen any of her other character names on a whim that day, we might have ended up with a YouTube sensation named Dumok, meaning “gangster boss,” or Ssang-kal, “double sword.” Maangchi says she hasn’t played a video game since.

Although she’s been on YouTube for over a decade, Maangchi’s mind is still overflowing with ideas for videos. “I have to update the recipes because if I make a video, it should be the best,” she says. She thinks of her viewers like customers who deserve the best product, and, in return, they “pay” her with their love and adoration. “Even though they don’t pay me directly, their compliments... you cannot buy these compliments with money. It’s much more than money. Because of their compliments, my self-esteem is going up, and I’m getting healthy. My endorphins are going up.”

The sheer breadth of Maangchi’s recipes means that she has videos on how to make Korean staples like kimchi and bulgogi as well as food that people living in Korea wouldn’t necessarily make at home since they’re sold on nearly every street corner. It never even occurred to me that anyone could make gyeran-ppang (egg bread), a street food I most look forward to eating when I visit Korea, until I saw Maangchi making them. And that’s all part of the can-do attitude that makes her so lovable. For immigrants, if you can’t go get the food you crave most, she shows you that you can take matters into your own hands to re-create it at home.

It’s clear that nostalgia plays a powerful role in what recipes Maangchi decides to make. In a video in which she makes matdongsan, she cheerfully sings the jingle from a 1975 commercial for the crunchy peanut crackers. It’s an enduring brand you can easily get at Korean grocery stores, but commenters say Maangchi’s homemade version brings a newfound appreciation for the classic snack. Matdongsan is just one of the many old-school recipes on Maangchi’s channel, and she explains that her cooking style is influenced by the way she was taught by her mother, aunts, and grandmothers.

Based on her preference for traditional recipes, I ask her if she’s experienced “immigrant timewarp,” explaining the phenomenon described by writer T.K. Park in which “immigrants tend to preserve their modes of thought and behavior of the country at the time when they emigrated.” Her eyes light up in recognition, and she tells me about the gatherings she used to have within her community of Korean immigrants when she came to America in the ‘90s. “We had a karaoke night every weekend, but all my songs were old songs that were popular when I lived in Korea. When I arrived there, the immigrants who arrived there 20 years before me, those guys’ favorite songs were real great-great-grandmothers’ songs,” she says, laughing. “Food is the same thing. I know all the traditional, authentic ways to make things, but sometimes, how I know about [newer recipes] is through my Korean viewers.”

The effects of immigrant timewarp can be staved off by regular travel back to the motherland, which Maangchi does every few years to visit relatives. But last year, she went with the goal of educating herself on Korean Buddhist temple cuisine, reaching out to the Korea Agro-Trade Center to ask if they could help connect her with Buddhist monks. What resulted was a lovely, wholesome video documenting her peaceful days of learning at Goun-sa, a Buddhist temple, and foraging for root vegetables in the lush mountains of the Gyeongsang Province.

Vegan temple cuisine is fundamentally different from most peoples’ understanding of Korean food as it doesn’t use meat, spicy ingredients, or anything that could “overstimulate” the body and prevent enlightenment. Yet, with Buddhism being one of the oldest religions in the country, its cuisine is authentically Korean. The video is especially refreshing because it’s one of the few times when Maangchi is out of her comfort zone of the kitchen, and we get to see her as an earnest, eager-to-learn student next to Wonhae, the Buddhist nun who is teaching her the basics of temple cuisine. The usual roles are reversed — Maangchi is always the teacher to her audience — but seeing this other side of her speaks to the enduring power of her personality. She’s been an internet fixture for over 12 years, but she can still find ways to turn the tables.