Sometimes I need to shake things up in the kitchen. Meatballs with tomato sauce and plenty of freshly grated Parmesan cheese is a favorite of mine. Recently, I decided to improvise on that recipe and add spicy-sweet gochujang to the basic meatball mixture along with shredded carrots for juiciness and sesame oil and ginger—a wonderful medley of Asian ingredients.
Gochujang is salty, spicy, and slightly sweet. It is a fermented red pepper paste from Korea with additional ingredients that add to its umami flavor, including fermented soybean powder and a sweetener like barley malt and fermented sweet rice.
