Eric Kim’s Current Cooking Obsessions

NYT Cooking’s king of chicken recipes just wants food to taste more like itself.

Eric Kim’s telling me about a light and brothy vodka sauce that he simmered with clam juice: “I’m getting at this thing this year about liquid and water and gentle cooking, extracting very nuanced, delicious umami flavors.”

He’s less into searing hot and fast these days, he says. “My mouth doesn’t always want that. Maybe I’ve just, like, grown up and my taste buds are, like—I just want to be, like, soothed.”

His most recent chicken recipe, for example, slowly renders thighs in the pan, a process that proceeds more calmly than your standard hard sear.

In this week’s podcast, I chatted with Eric about his endless quest for better ways to cook chicken, the less-popular recipes he wishes more readers would try, and the way he really thinks we should all be making s’mores.

He also confesses a not-very-secret food media crush.

We talk cold noodles, potato salad, and the endless wait for truly good tomatoes—plus a bit about his currently-in-progress book project. “I love talking about things before they’re done,” he says, grinning, “because it gives me pressure to, like, actually finish it.”

Scroll down for many, many links from Eric, plus a full recipe for a deeply satisfying way to eat a ton of vegetables this week.

Win a copy of Korean American

Eric’s hero Nigella Lawson calls this book “and a rich repository of memories and deliciousness.” Which is to say: you need a copy if you don’t have one already.

Here’s how to enter: Make sure you’re signed up as a paid subscriber to this newsletter by end of day Thursday, July 10, 2025. Your support is essential for keeping this work going.

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Eric mentioned:

Lofthouse Cookies (NYT Cooking; all NYT links are gift links)
Aaron Hutcherson’s Baked Chicken Thighs With Butter and Onions (Washington Post)
Crispy Chicken With Lime Butter (NYT Cooking)
Canal House’s Chicken Thighs With Lemon (excerpted from Food52 Genius Recipes)
Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand (Bookshop here)
Roasted Chicken With Fish-Sauce Butter
Maangchi’s Korean Fried Chicken (Food52)
Sheet-Pan Bibimbap (NYT Cooking)
Kimchi Jigae With Ribs (NYT Cooking)
Pasta With Green Bean Ragù (NYT Cooking)
Marry Me Salmon (NYT Cooking)
Melissa Clark’s Banana Snacking Cake With Salted Caramel Glaze (NYT Cooking)
Nigella Lawson’s Lemon Linguine
Apple and Broccoli Salad (NYT Cooking)
Angel Hair Pasta Salad (NYT Cooking)
Hondashi
Kendra Vaculin’s Oyakodon (Bon Appétit)
Honey Mustard Potato Salad (NYT Cooking)
Cold Noodles With Tomato (NYT Cooking)
Cold Noodles With Zucchini (NYT Cooking)
Hetbahn Cooked White Rice (or find at HMart)
Jalapeño Grilled Chicken Breasts (NYT Cooking)
Microwave-Steamed Eggs (NYT Cooking)
Nigella Lawson’s Feast
Brendan Liew’s Tokyo Up Late (Alibris here)
Mayo Corn Fried Rice (NYT Cooking)
Romy Gill’s India (Bookshop here)
Amy Thielen’s Company (Bookshop here)
Amy Thielen’s Chicken Breast With Gin and Sage (NYT Cooking)
Stanley Tucci’s Beloved Zucchini Pasta (Serious Eats)
Kendra Vaculin’s Zucchini Butter
Pasta al Pomodoro (NYT Cooking)
Genevieve Yam’s Microwave-Poached Eggs (Serious Eats)
Carrot-Ginger Dressing (NYT Cooking)

Maggie mentioned:

Steve Stolman’s Roasted Chicken Provençal (NYT Cooking)
Kendra Vaculin’s Peach and Butter Pecan Ice Cream Icebox Cake (Epicurious)
Kevin Noble Maillard’s Microwave-Poached Salmon (NYT Cooking)

This newsletter contains affiliate links—your purchase helps keep the dinner ideas coming. Want more cookbook recs from expert guests? Here’s the all-time list.

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Weeknight Curry Rice With Eggplant, Spinach, and Lotus Root

Excerpted with permission from Korean American. Copyright © 2022 Eric Kim. Published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Random House.

SERVES 8 TO 10

This is the curry I make for myself in New York when I want something quick, easy, and absolutely loaded with vegetables, a commodity I sometimes overlook in my weekly dinner repertoire. But over the holidays, when I made this for my family in Georgia and served it alongside some fluffy steamed rice, they all said I had to include it in the book. I love this dish for that reason: It wasn’t supposed to be here. It was just dinner one night, that lovely moment in a cook’s life when food for you becomes food for others.

Tip: This stew freezes beautifully. I like to freeze individual portions so I can have curry whenever I want.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound skinless pork belly, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 large yellow onion, diced
1 large globe eggplant, peeled and cut into 2-inch pieces
2 large carrots, peeled and sliced on a bias into 2-inch pieces
1 (8-ounce) lotus root, peeled and cut into 1-inch-thick pieces
1 cup boiling water
1 (220-gram) packet instant Korean or Japanese curry mix (like Golden Curry), broken into pieces
1 (12-ounce) bag fresh spinach
Cooked white rice, for serving

1. In a large pot or Dutch oven set over medium-high heat, add the olive oil and fry the pork belly, stirring occasionally, until just starting to brown at the edges, about 5 minutes.

2. Add the onion and eggplant and stir to coat in the pork fat. Throw in the carrots and lotus root, and top all of this off with 5 cups of cold water. Raise the heat to high and bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low, and gently boil until the carrots and lotus root are cooked through (a fork will easily slide into them) and the eggplant is essentially unidentifiable and has melted into the stew, about 1 hour.

3. In a medium bowl, stir together the boiling water and the instant curry mix until moderately smooth (it doesn’t have to be perfectly homogenous). Add this aromatic brown sludge to the pot and stir well. Stir in the spinach and watch it reduce in size by approximately the size of a football field (or just let it simmer until cooked down and soft, 2 to 3 minutes).

4. Serve the curry alongside or over the white rice.

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