How a daughter made her mother a viral Korean cooking star

There's nothing like watching a home cook who has been cooking for their entire life do their thing in the kitchen. That’s just one of the pleasures of watching the woman who has become Umma or Korean Mom to millions of social media users. Her daughter, Sarah Ahn, has documented hundreds of cooking sessions with her mom, Nam Soon Ahn and along the way many have learned a cuisine and gotten to know the multi-generational household. Their new cookbook is Umma: A Korean Mom’s Kitchen Wisdom and 100 Family Recipes.

Evan Kleiman: I am such a fan. I am on Tiktok, and I don't love a lot of the cooking videos that go on there, but from when I saw the very first one that I saw of yours, I knew that something was very, very different with your entire approach. Your relationship with your mother is very tender, mega respectful and so intimate, and all of that manages to come through while the viewer can clearly see what's happening in the pot, that is not easy to do.

Sarah Ahn: Thank you for recognizing that. I would say our relationship is very close, and I always say the theme of Ahnest Kitchen is the richness and the ordinary in capturing those fleeting but intimate moments.

Did you start your blog before you started videoing?

Yeah, Ahnest Kitchen first started as a blog, and it's kind of where it all started. I've always loved writing and talking about the Ahnest life, and I shared my recipes there. Then I went onto social media in 2022 or 2023.

Your mother is the spine of this whole endeavor, both your video channels and now the cookbook. Tell us about her, what role cooking has played in her life. Has she ever been a restaurateur or worked in a restaurant? And who did she learn from? 

My mom used to own a restaurant here in Orange County. She had it for a little over 10 years, and it had decent success. She was the cook, the cashier. She did everything, and it provided a roof over our heads for quite some time. But as with anyone who owns a restaurant, it tears apart your family. It's a lot of work. It's not as fun as it sounds. So she was really cooking for survival and making recipes and food that could sell and make people want to come back. It was really a survival type of lifestyle that we look back on and don't want to ever experience again. 

She most certainly grew up with women, particularly her mother, but back then in Korea, every woman cooked, so she was always surrounded by that. She was always told by her own mother, who was a very well known cook back in Korea, that my mom has sonmat, and sonmat is the "taste of the hands," but in more meaningful translation, it means someone who has a talent for cooking, a natural intuition.

"Umma: A Korean Mom’s Kitchen Wisdom and 100 Family Recipes" documents the countless recipes made in Sarah Ahn’s viral videos with her mother, Nam Soon Ahn. Photo courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen.

And someone for whom, once you eat a lot of their food, there is a signature set of tastes. The hand. I love that. Can you take me back to the first time you filmed your mother cooking, and was she super open to it?

She was very open to it. She doesn't really notice that the camera is there. That doesn't mean I'm filming her without her consent because she knows I'm there and I'm filming her. But when she's cooking, she's in her element. It's like seeing a very talented dancer dance, and a ballet dancer just do flips and twirls. Their only focus is on that. That's the same exact thing with my mom. When she's cooking, nothing else exists in that moment but her hands and the food and the ingredients in the pot.

It's amazing to watch that level of expertise. It's rare. It's really rare. And you're so lucky to get to learn from someone like that. Does she let you help her or has she taught you? Do you feel confident cooking on your own?

It's interesting, because in the book, there's an essay in there about her mother. I asked my mom, did you ever learn this recipe from our grandma? And she said, grandma always told me, "I'm not going to teach you this recipe because I don't want you to live a life like this." 

Back in Korea, when they're always cooking for the means to survive to get through harsh winter months, and when I asked my mom if she could teach me these recipes, she always tells me, "I'm going to teach you these recipes because I want you to have them and for you to have memories of me through these foods. But I hope that you don't have to cook so hard and work so hard in life to have to survive through these foods." 

So she always has a little bit of hesitance, just because that's kind of our upbringing and background. But she's always been excited to share it with me so that we could share it with the world.

"It's like seeing a very talented dancer dance," says Sarah Ahn (right) of watching her mother cook and move around the kitchen. Photo by Kritsada Panichgul.

I have to say, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, that some of my favorite videos are when she's packing food up for your brother. For someone who has never seen these videos, can you describe what goes on, the amount, but the love. She's so workman-like, she's so focused and matter of fact and not effusive. But the love that underpins these videos is just so moving.

Yeah, those videos, it's basically what my mom packs my brother, who works up to 80 hours a week because he's a resident, is overworked and barely has time to cook. Then there's another series — what my mom packs my dad, who works as an exterior painter, often working under the hot sun. In those videos, she packs them a lot of food, I'm talking a table full of food for them to last a week for my brother or for my dad for his lunch. 

She wakes up every day at 4:30 a.m. to pack my dad's lunch, and she cooks everything fresh. For my brother, she will spend the three days before he comes home just cooking everything, kimchi from scratch, fried foods from scratch, and she would freeze it for him, and packs all of them in individual containers. He has essentially meal-prepped food for the entire week that was handmade, made with love by my mom, where she worked up to 12 hours that day to pack him those foods.

I'd love to talk about the food. We're here in Southern California. Nearly everybody listening who is in Southern California has experienced Korean food. I live very near LA's Koreatown. There are many cuisines that I have tackled in my life, aside from my expertise, Italian food. Korean food, I've made pickles. I love making winter radish pickles. But I have to say that I've been reticent to throw myself in because the idea of having to learn a lot of sub-recipes is something that I just know I don't want to take a lot of time for. So I was wondering if you could throw some recipe ideas from the book at us where everything is included in one recipe so we don't have to start with pickling something a month ago. 

With the pickled recipes in our book, we also have options where you can buy the pickled product itself first and then just season it from there. But we do make a caveat that if you do that, it's not going to taste as good as when you pickle it yourself. 

Of course not. 

But there are a lot of recipes in our book where you can make it from start to finish in that one sitting, like one-pot recipes and whatnot. But we do have a whole pickle section.

Which is amazing! The chili pickles. I know that's the first thing that I'm gonna make. Can you describe them?

Yes, the chili pickles. So my mom plants these green peppers in our yard every year, and they grow in abundance. My mom pickles them and they last in our fridge for over three years. They're pickled so well with this perfect brine that makes them last a very long time. Once you pickle them, it's in a soy sauce brine, it just marinates it so beautifully. You have the crunch of the pepper but you also have the spice of the pepper then you have this sweet soy sauce blend that's infused into it. 

My mom pierces the pepper with forks so that the flavor goes into it, and then you can eat it as is, as a pickle, or you can marinate it in this spicy marinade and then enjoy it as a banchan, which is a side dish. I actually brought this marinated banchan pickled green chili peppers to ATK [America's Test Kitchen]. I literally traveled from California to Boston in my suitcase with a huge jar of pickles. The test cooks at Cook's Illustrated were just stunned by its flavors because it was so nuanced and complex.

There's nothing like that time, right? Time is the element. 

Yes, yes, it is. 

Nam Soon Ahn makes an instant kimchi that is ready to eat within a day. Photo by Kritsada Panichgul.

So let's start out with some kimchi but kimchi that we can make and eat pretty soon, not so much that we have to age.

Oh, yes. There's instant kimchi. For one, the kimchi that we're most familiar with, the one you get at Korean barbecue and Korean restaurants, that's called Napa cabbage kimchi. In our book, we call it mat kimchi. You can eat it as soon as the next day. It's developed in that way so that you can enjoy it with everything because that's the daily kimchi that we're most familiar with, the one that we have most often. So that's something you can enjoy probably after 24 hours. 

After that, it's going to ferment a bit. And then after that, there's other kimchi in there, such as perilla kimchi, where you marinate perilla leaves in the spicy blend, and you can enjoy that as soon as possible. As well as cucumber kimchi and whatnot. We also do include kimchi that requires more fermentation if you want that richness taste and the traditional taste.

There's a cucumber kimchi that starts with these pickled cucumbers that look extraordinary. 

Yes, yes.

One of the things I love about how your mother cooks is she has so much technique that is very apparent that you often don't see in home cooks. How she deals with fruit and onion juices and how she refers to the onion juices as juices is kind of fascinating to me. Could you talk about the role of the fruit and the onion juices in her cooking?

Yes, she uses Fuji apples, onions, and Asian pears to create a lot of marinades and to create a juice out of them that is like this sweetener versus just using sugar when you have fruit juices, she told me, it adds a much more multi-dimensional sweetness to a dish. It's more nuanced. It's more complex. I think maybe someone who is new to cooking can't taste those differences but someone who's appreciative of food will notice those differences when they taste that depth. 

What she does is she either blends the Fuji apple, onions or Asian pear in a blender, then she puts it through a cloth strainer and juices it out so that you get this pure, smooth juice. I asked her, when I see other online Korean cooks make this, especially the Korean Americans, they don't put it through a strainer. She was like, no, no, no, Sarah. Everyone in Korea, a lot of them are putting it through a cloth strainer because there's a significant difference with it. 

For example, when you make LA galbi, it's most often you use these fruit juices, and people just blend it up, put the whole blend with the pulp and everything in there. She told me when you do that, what happens is that the meat is going to cook at a different rate, where the meat is going to not be cooked fully but the outside is going to burn because we didn't take out that pulp and all that sugar is crystallizing and burning now. But when you put it through a strainer, you're making it extremely smooth, so that when you cook the meat, the meat is going to cook at a great rate, with that sweetener not burning. 

I love how there are times in the book where you describe how you think your mother is going a step too far. And you say, why can't you just do it the simpler way? And she sort of takes it as a challenge, and she does a tasting for you, side by side.

A/B testing, and she always proves me right. 

No, she always proves you wrong. 

Proves me wrong. Right. She always proves me wrong. And I realized, mom is always right, why am I questioning her?

The first dish I'll probably make from the book will probably be the spicy braised tofu. 

Oh, that's a great one.

A sauce is made from a blend of Korean pantry ingredients in a spicy braised tofu dish. Photo by Kritsada Panichgul.

I love eating tofu in this way, and your version just looks so good. Can you quickly take us through the steps?

So spicy braised tofu is, first and foremost, that's a great first pick. It's essentially where you use a firm block of tofu, you season it with a little bit of salt, then you pan fry it until it's just lightly going brown. While you're pan frying it, you make the sauce. It's a blend of Korean pantry ingredients, gochugaru, Korean red pepper flakes, a little bit of sweetener, a little bit of onion and fresh peppers and whatnot. You whisk up the sauce, and as the tofu is cooking, you pour the sauce in. Then you braise the tofu so that the sauce goes into the tofu. The tofu cooks up extremely plush and tender but it's braised with this brilliant gochujang sauce. 

It's a sauce that my mom tested many times to perfect. By the time that you're done, you just have a whole skillet of just this vibrant red tofu that you didn't know tofu can be enjoyed this way. And whenever we make this, and my followers have made it, they told me they eat the whole thing before it even lands on the plate. 

I can imagine that.

Yes, because it's so addicting. If you can't finish it all, you can put it in the refrigerator and it tastes just as if not better. It tastes better cold.

All the fried rice recipes look so good but there's one that you say is the quintessential Korean pantry dish, the egg rice with avocado.

Yes, gyeranbap. Every Asian, I think we all have our own variation of it, where you mix soy sauce with rice and some egg, however you like it cooked. But the Korean version, we use sesame oil and soy sauce and whatever leftover rice you have. Scramble your egg, whatever way you like it. We like it scrambled. But my mom's extra touch to it, because we were raised in California, she adds avocados. And that's something we hadn't seen within other Korean households but it goes to show you just how each cook adapts to wherever they are.

The next recipe in the book is spinach fried rice. She has a technique where she uses a paper towel to sop up the extra moisture that the spinach throws off. She dabs it in the pan and soaks it up. I think her food at the restaurant must have been amazing because this kind of attention to detail, to concentrate flavors, is very interesting.

Yes, and that's also to keep the rice crispy, so that the spinach doesn't dilute the rice. That's a brilliant recipe. Thank you for recognizing that.

What does your dad think about all this? 

He's extremely proud. He's also confused as well, just as my mom is, because they're so confused of how people can relate to us. We live a very, very ordinary life where, like I mentioned earlier, my dad paints and my mom used to be a former restaurant owner. We're not extravagant. We're not doctors or engineers or in these "prestigious careers." I say that in quotes. My parents are confused why people are able to resonate with us. Because in Korea, to not be in this prestigious job, they're often shunned upon. So they're confused with how people are able to celebrate and resonate as ,which is, in a way, heartbreaking, but they're also so happy that they're being recognized for their hard work.

I just want to say that I think what you've done is really extraordinary. First of all, your videos are just, I'm gonna start crying, your videos are so moving and wonderful, and watching your mother is such a joy. So that is an amazing accomplishment. Very rarely does a "Tiktok star" translate to a book that is a real cookbook that has heft and rigorous recipes. So kudos really to you and the ATK team. 

Thank you so much.