Where do recipes come from? I don’t want to get too abstruse, but sometimes the inspiration is as ethereal as a great pop song or poem — a creative act that seems like it has always existed, waiting to be discovered.
I have been obsessed with Eric Kim’s recipe for a gochujang caramel cookie since seeing just its name in The New York Times last year. He’s honest about its genesis: It’s possibly the third-generation iteration of a candy-sprinkled sugar cookie and an M&M-dotted variant, “kid stuff” that jumps to a sophisticated morsel. I mean: gochujang caramel? Where has this been all my life? It even sounds like umami plus.
If you don’t know, gochujang is a spicy, sweet, salty and funky condiment used in Korean cuisine, with its bite coming from gochu-garu chili powder, its sweet from fermented glutinous rice and its funk from fermented soybean powder that covers most Samin Nosrat flavor bases in a single spoon.
The caramel comes from brown sugar and butter. The sugar and butterfat temper the chili heat a bit (and if you let it sit for a bit it gets smooth), but the fire is still there.
Although the thought of gochujang caramel makes me want to slather it all over a pork tenderloin, duck breast or shrimp for the grill, the idea of using it in a cookie seems revolutionary. Chilies have made dessert appearances before, such as the 1990s spate of Meso-American chili-chocolate pairings or an Asian-infected chocolate-Sichuan peppercorn variation.
Regardless, this is all proof that there’s still room to play. In the recipe below, I’ve added chocolate chunks to Kim’s formulation, because, well, chocolate!
Want to take it further? How about chopped walnuts? Or forget I mentioned chocolate and try chopped bits of crystalized ginger, which may be my next variant, bolstering the heat and the Asian reference. Who knows where this could lead?
Gochujang Caramel Chocolate Chunk Cookies
Adapted from Eric Kim
Makes 8 to 10 large cookies
For the gochujang caramel:
- 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
- 1 tablespoon gochujang (Mother-In-Law’s original suggested)
For the cookie dough:
- 7 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 large egg, at room temperature
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1½ cup all-purpose flour
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ¾ teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 to 2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, cut into small, rough chunks (Guittard suggested)
For the gochujang caramel
1. Mix 1 tablespoon butter with brown sugar and gochujang until it forms a smooth paste. Set aside.
For the cookies
2. In a large bowl, cream the 7 tablespoons butter with sugar, egg, vanilla, salt and cinnamon with a hand mixer until smooth. Whisk the flour and baking soda together in a separate bowl. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter-sugar mixture, stirring by hand to combine. Refrigerate dough for 15 to 20 minutes, until soft and workable but not too sticky. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line one large baking sheet pan with parchment paper.
3. Remove dough from refrigerator. Spoon the gochujang caramel over the cookie dough in 3 to 4 spaced-out dollops. Swirl the caramel with a spoon in long, circular strokes into the dough to create caramel streaks throughout. (Don’t overwork the dough — you want wide, distinct stripes of the orange-colored caramel distinct from the lighter dough.)
4. For the cookies, measure ¼-cup rounds. (An ice cream scoop is perfect for this.) Spaced about 3 inches apart, you should get 8 to 10 cookies. Bake for 6 to 8 minutes until the individual cookies start to flatten and spread. Remove the pan from the oven and scatter chocolate chunks over the cookies, lightly pressing them into the dough. Rotate the pan and return to the oven, baking for another 6 to 8 minutes until the cookies are just barely browning at the edges.
5. Remove from the oven and cool completely on the pan. (The cookies will flatten and continue to cook a bit as they cool.) Keep in an airtight container at room temperature for about two days.
