The guests that day were not beginners. Among them were chefs who cook with Korean ingredients professionally, home cooks who have been making kimchi and fermenting for years, people who already knew what ganjang was and had strong opinions about it. They had come to Korea specifically for this — not as tourists, but as people who take Korean food seriously and wanted to go further.
None of that turned out to matter much. By the end of the day, everyone was taking notes.
The road into Changpyeong winds through the kind of countryside that makes you slow down without deciding to. You follow the road further, past fields and old stone walls, until a tree line opens and you see them: over twelve hundred earthenware jars, arranged in long rows across sloping ground, backed by pine forest and the ancestral burial mounds of the Ko family. No sign. No fanfare. Just the jars — and inside every single one of them, jang in some stage of becoming: fermenting, deepening, waiting. Three hundred and seventy years of this. Still going.
Master Ki Soon-do came out to greet us in a hanbok — the traditional Korean formal dress — the color of gardenia yellow. She has lived at this estate for fifty-five years, she told us. Since before most of us were born, she has been here with the jars.
This was the fifth stop on the Kim'C Market Culinary Odyssey — a private, small-group journey through Korea built not on itineraries but on relationships. Ryan Kim, Kim'C Market's founder, has long been one of the people bringing Master Ki Soon-do's jang to American tables — sourcing it, telling its story, making sure it reaches the kitchens that deserve to cook with it. His respect for her work runs deep, and it shows in the kind of access the Culinary Odyssey makes possible. We did not arrive as visitors with a booking. We arrived as people who had been expected — and within minutes, we were already moving through the jar collection with Ko Hoon-kuk, Master Ki Soon-do's son, leading the way.
Korea's Grand Master No. 35
Master Ki Soon-do holds the designation of National Food Master No. 35, awarded by Korea's Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs — specifically for jinjang, the long-aged soy sauce that is her specialty and her life's work. She is the tenth-generation head of the Ko family estate in Changpyeong: a line of women who have maintained this jar collection, this fermentation practice, and this particular expression of Korean soy sauce for over three and a half centuries. The seed soy sauce at the center of it all — the ssiganjang that serves as the mother culture for every new batch — is three hundred and seventy years old. Not a continuous brew in the literal sense, but a living lineage: each year's new batch inoculated with a measure of the old, the flavor of one generation carried forward into the next.
The chefs who have made the journey here include those from Noma in Denmark, Central in Peru, and Disfrutar in Spain — all former holders of the World's 50 Best Restaurants top spot. In the jar collection, forty-something jars belong to chefs from twenty-five different countries: each one logged, managed, and aging toward the day its owner returns to collect it. These chefs go back to their restaurants and cook with what they made here. The jang travels with them.
Ko Min-gyeon, Master Ki Soon-do's daughter and designated successor, and Ko Hoon-kuk, her son and CEO of Goryeo Traditional Foods, carry this work into the world. Together they run the Ki Soon-do Fermentation School at the estate — a program that draws students from Korea and abroad, with materials prepared in both Korean and English, because the people who come here arrive from everywhere.
Master Ki Soon-do's response to all of this has not changed: "I've lived with these jars for fifty-five years. The fact that people travel this far to learn — I'm not the remarkable thing here. Korean food culture is the remarkable thing."
Three Ingredients. Everything Else Is Time.
The day began indoors, with Ko Min-gyeon standing at the front of the room and a slide deck open behind her: Jang Making: A Year-Long Journey Through Four Seasons. Before anyone touched a jar or picked up a pestle, the foundation had to be understood.
Jang is made from three ingredients: soybeans, salt, and water. That is the complete list. The soybeans are fermented into meju — compressed, dried blocks that cure for months before going into the jar. When the meju is submerged in salted water and time does its work, the liquid becomes ganjang (soy sauce). The solids become doenjang (fermented soybean paste). Add gochugaru (Korean chili flakes), meju powder, and jocheong (rice malt syrup) to that base and you have gochujang (fermented chili paste). Combine doenjang and gochujang and you have ssamjang — the thick, savory paste that goes with grilled meat and fresh vegetables wrapped in leafy greens. The entire architecture of Korean fermented seasoning, built from three ingredients and time.
Ko Min-gyeon walked through the science — the role of meju, the function of salt in controlling fermentation, the way flavor compounds develop over years rather than weeks — and then arrived at something her mother says often, and means precisely:
"Originally, all Korean food was seasoned with ganjang. Salt only seasons. Ganjang seasons and flavors at the same time."
The room went quiet for a moment. The chefs in the group had been cooking with ganjang. They understood the difference between light and dark soy. What they had not considered — what none of us had fully considered — was that the default to salt in Korean cooking is historically an exception, not the rule. That the original intention was always ganjang. That something had been lost in the simplification, and that what was lost was flavor.
Ganjang comes in several distinct forms here. Cheonggang — light, bright, clean — is used where color matters and a delicate hand is needed. Jinjang — dark, viscous, deeply sweet — is Master Ki Soon-do's specialty: a minimum of five years in the jar, the color deepening toward black as water evaporates and sugars concentrate. Ssiganjang, the seed sauce, carries the accumulated memory of every batch before it — added in small amounts to new jars, the way a baker keeps back a measure of starter. The only way to understand what these distinctions actually mean, Ko Min-gyeon said, is to taste them. So after the lecture, we went outside.
Ko Min-gyeon poured from the jars — a spoonful of each, moving from youngest to oldest. The cheonggang was startlingly clear, almost delicate. Then came the jinjang aged past five years: saltiness rounded, finish lengthened, flavor arriving in layers that kept building after you swallowed. Not deeper in the way of more — deeper in the way of further. The kind of thing that makes you put down the spoon and just stay with it for a moment. Questions followed each pour — about aging, about use, about what made this batch different from the one beside it. Ryan translated throughout, and Master Ki Soon-do answered everything.
"Old soy sauce," she said, "becomes medicine."
She was not speaking metaphorically.
The Work of the Hands
From tasting, we moved to making — and making jang begins not with a jar but with a soybean.
The beans had been cooking since before dawn over a wood-fired cauldron in the courtyard. The cooked beans went into a stone mortar, and everyone took turns at the pestle — and the technique had improved noticeably since a few days earlier at Master Lee Ha-yeon's kimchi institute, where the same group had pounded glutinous rice for injeolmi— chewy rice cakes dusted in roasted soybean powder. The muscle memory was there. The beans, still warm from the cauldron, crushed easily — nutty, faintly sweet, nothing like raw soybeans — and the work moved faster than it might have otherwise. The room filled with the kind of sound and effort that means something is actually being made.
When the beans were ground, we gathered around the meju forms — rectangular molds that shape the compressed soybean blocks. One mold holds roughly 3.8 kilograms of bean paste. Each was filled by hand, packed tightly, smoothed. Ko Min-gyeon offered the traditional encouragement: a well-shaped meju, the saying goes, means you'll have a beautiful daughter. The room laughed. The meju came out well.
Then she said something that quieted things a little. There is a belief, she explained, that the hands of the person making meju leave something in it — not metaphorically, but literally, in the flavor. Sonmat — the taste of hands, the idea that a cook's accumulated intuition and attention leave a physical trace in what they make. Everyone's is different. Joseph Lidgerwood, chef of Evett restaurant, who has been coming to this estate for eight years, has been told that his jang develops a faint note of cheese — something no recipe could produce, because no recipe accounts for the hands. This is why Master Ki Soon-do does not use gloves, and why she does not ask her guests to either. The meju we shaped that morning would carry, however faintly, something of the people who made it.
The finished blocks were turned out, halved, and set to dry before being hung on straw rope to cure for the months ahead. We also worked with meju that had already completed that process: dense, aged blocks threaded onto straw by hand, passed person to person around the group. The technique does not come naturally, and the effort showed — but the point, as with everything here, was not polish. It was contact. The hands in the meju. The name on the jar. The wish said aloud over something that won't be ready for years. This is how the place gets into you.
The Jar Has a Name
In the afternoon, we made jang.
Master Ki Soon-do and Ko Min-gyeon demonstrated first: meju blocks lowered one by one into a deep jar, slowly and with full attention, no rushing. We went around in turn, each person placing a block. Then came the brine — the estate's deep-well water mixed with bamboo salt, poured from a ladle in careful measures. You do not spill it. When the jar was nearly full, Ko Min-gyeon laid split bamboo crosswise over the top — in most regions a river stone is used as a weight, but in Damyang, where bamboo is everywhere, they use what the land gives. Charcoal for purification. Red pepper for its antibacterial properties. Dried jujube, because you want the sauce to taste as good as a jujube — Master Ki Soon-do said this with a smile, as if it were obvious. A cloth seal over the mouth, and a lid.
Before the lid closed, each of us wrote our name on a slip of paper cut in the shape of a beoseon — the curved, boat-toed sock that is part of traditional Korean dress — and attached it to the outside of the jar, so the jar would know whose hands had made it.
Every jar is digitally tracked — ID, date, salt type, salinity, meju weight, all of it logged and accessible on a monitor in the fermentation building. Twelve hundred jars, each one individually managed. The tradition is three hundred and seventy years old. The management system is not.
Together with Master Ki Soon-do, we stood around the sealed jar and wished it well — that it would ferment beautifully, that time would do what only time can do. The jar was closed. And with that closing came a quiet understanding: this is not a place you visit once. Somewhere down the line, that jar needs to be opened. It is the reason to return.
Everything on the Table
The grounds at Master Ki Soon-do's estate have their own logic. The plants along the path — herbs pushing up through the gravel, things that look like weeds until someone names them — were all placed deliberately. Some were left by visiting chefs: mint, lemon balm, arugula. Jepi — Korean pepper tree leaves, fragrant with something between citrus and black pepper — grows near the fence. At lunch, we wrapped rice in jepi leaves and ate them as ssam — the Korean practice of wrapping a bite of food in a leaf and eating it whole. The grounds themselves were seasoning the table.
And the table was generous in the way that only happens when someone genuinely wanted you there. Everything for lunch had been made that morning, by us, with Master Ki Soon-do's guidance — and every single dish was seasoned not with salt but with ganjang. Juktongbap — Damyang's signature rice cooked inside a sealed bamboo tube, opened at the table, fragrant and faintly green. Fresh kimchi, cold cucumber dish, fermented soybean paste stew, laver chips. From the first bite to the last, a table seasoned entirely with ganjang.
That fresh kimchi — geotjeori, served immediately before fermentation begins — had been seasoned with ganjang rather than salt. One of the chefs, who makes kimchi back in the States, was intrigued. He said he was going to try it with ganjang when he got home.
Back inside, the afternoon session turned to gochujang — and to a problem one of the guests had been carrying for months. She had tried making strawberry gochujang at home in the States. The instinct was right, she knew that much. But something about the result hadn't landed. Ko Min-gyeon explained what was missing. The strawberries don't get puréed or reduced separately. They go in whole — actual pieces of fruit — and cook down together with jocheong until deeply concentrated, almost jamlike, before being folded into the fermented base. The sweetness doesn't sit on top. It goes underneath, becomes structural. She opened her notebook. The questions that followed — ratios, ripeness, timing, whether other fruits followed the same logic — went on for some time. Ryan translated each one. Master Ki Soon-do answered without rushing.
The warm sikhye — a rice drink made with barley malt, naturally sweet without any added sugar — was its own small revelation when tasted straight from the pot. Master Ki Soon-do offered more without being asked — no charge, have another. The room laughed in every language present.
That evening, before the table was laid, the conversation turned to the question of why — why so many people travel this far, specifically to learn jang from her. Master Ki Soon-do had been present through the whole day: demonstrating each step herself, explaining quietly and precisely, answering every question without impatience. She thought for a moment.
"People make food," she said. "But food makes people. How well you eat determines how healthy you are."
She paused.
"Korean fermented food is now recognized around the world as something that is genuinely good for you. That is why they come. Not just to learn a technique — but because they understand that what you put into your body matters. And the best of what Korea has to offer is fermented."
She looked out at the jar collection.
"Korea is a country of fermentation. Beans ferment into doenjang and ganjang. Vegetables ferment into kimchi. Rice ferments into rice wine and vinegar. Fish ferment into jeotgal — salted, fermented seafood. All of it natural. All of it made by time."
The table was laid shortly after. Course after course, more than anyone expected. By the time the meal wound down, everyone at the table had something they were taking home — not just the kimchi they had packed that morning, but a question answered, a method corrected, a thing they thought they already knew and now understood differently.
A Cup Before You Go
Late in the evening, one of the guests developed a cough. Without a word about it, Master Ki Soon-do disappeared inside and returned with a cup of warm ginger tea — fresh ginger steeped in cheong (a naturally fermented fruit syrup), made by her own hand, offered quietly to the person who needed it.
It was not a gesture for the group. It was not part of the program. It was simply what you do when someone at your table is not feeling well.
That is the thing about a day like this that no itinerary can promise and no ticket can buy. Master Ki Soon-do has spent fifty-five years here with her jars, receiving people who arrive from far away and leaving them better fed than they arrived. The ginger tea was not the exception. It was the whole point, expressed in a cup.
It was fully dark by the time we left. Somewhere behind us, twelve hundred jars held their breath and waited.
From the Estate to Your Kitchen
FAQ
What is jinjang, and how is it different from regular soy sauce?
Jinjang is Korean soy sauce fermented for a minimum of five years, often much longer. As it ages, water evaporates, the color deepens toward near-black, and the flavor transforms: saltiness recedes, and a natural sweetness and viscosity develop from concentrated amino acids and sugars. Master Ki Soon-do's jinjang is drawn from a seed culture — ssiganjang — that is three hundred and seventy years old. The soy sauce in most supermarkets is fermented for months. The difference is not subtle.
What is bamboo salt, and why does Master Ki Soon-do use it?
Bamboo salt — juknyeom — is made by packing sea salt into bamboo tubes, sealing the ends with clay, and roasting them over pine-fire at high temperature, traditionally repeated multiple times. The process changes the salt's mineral composition and reduces its bitterness. Damyang's bamboo forests make it a natural fit for this estate specifically — the raw material grows on the same land where the jang is made.
What is meju, and why does it matter?
Meju is the compressed, dried, mold-fermented soybean block that forms the foundation of Korean ganjang and doenjang. Cooked soybeans are ground, shaped into blocks, and hung to cure for months — during which beneficial molds and bacteria produce the enzymes that will later transform a simple brine into a deeply complex sauce. The meju is submerged in salted water; the liquid becomes ganjang, the solids become doenjang. Without the meju, there is no sauce — only salted water.
What is strawberry gochujang, and can I make it at home?
Strawberry gochujang is one of Master Ki Soon-do's signature variations. The key is that the strawberries go in whole — actual pieces of fruit, not purée — cooked down with jocheong until deeply concentrated and jamlike before being folded into the fermented gochujang base. The fruit's sweetness becomes part of the sauce's foundation rather than sitting on top of it. It follows the same logic as the original: the right ingredient, at the right moment, in the right form.
How can I experience this with Kim'C Market?
The Culinary Odyssey to Korea is a private, small-group journey built on years of direct relationships with Korea's most respected food makers. The day at Master Ki Soon-do's estate is one stop on a week-long journey that also includes time with a National Kimchi Master, a Buddhist temple food experience, a fifth-generation tea grower, and a traditional ceramics workshop. The program runs twice a year. Full details at kimcmarket.com.