WALTER RHEE’S COOKING CLASSES AND FOOD TOURS / When you get your Korean plate lunch, do you always go for the kimchi, pajeon and other side dishes that you can’t even pronounce? Do you wonder how some Korean home chefs are able to whip up so many delicious dishes for a meal, while you don’t even know what noodles are used to make chap chae? If you’re not familiar with Korean culture and language, but love Korean food, it can seem like a daunting task to try to make your favorite dishes, considering that much of the good stuff is mostly labeled in Korean.

Here’s a plan:

On a Saturday afternoon, travel to Palama Market in Kalihi. Find your way to the back of the housewares section and take the wooden stairs to your right. The stairs to the left will lead you to the stores’ offices (oops). Enter the modest employee break room and you’ll find self-described “food pundit” Walter Rhee setting up for class. Rhee’s approach is simple: a hodgepodge of differently colored bowls, two portable gas stoves, disposable dishware and a collection of wholesale-sized condiments. The humble surroundings are comforting, bringing the accessibility of cooking to a kitchen setting suited for an average living space.

On this day, Rhee offers a two-and-a-half-hour cooking demonstration class with one hands-on component. He says his students range from housewives to tourists to K-drama fans, and some take every class of his. Today, the group consists of a few middle-aged women and a mother-daughter duo–intimate compared to the 16-plus students Rhee says he sometimes has. This means one thing in everyone’s minds: more to eat! Students will not only leave the class with more cooking knowledge and kitchen confidence, but also full stomachs and leftovers.

One of the reasons Rhee has many repeat students is that his cooking principles are simple enough that they can be applied to many types of dishes, even to other cuisines, such as Italian and Chinese. “He will give you all the secrets, he doesn’t hold anything back,” says one of the repeat students, who has brought a newbie friend along.

Instead of using measuring devices, Rhee goes by the principle of evenness–a one-to-one-to-one ratio of ingredients. In terms of herbs and spices, he only uses enough to dust the dish. For sauces, he adds enough until the dish has reached the desired color. While these eyeballing principles used by many a cook may scare the novice, seeing Rhee achieve delicious results time after time during class will convince you otherwise. As the students dig into each dish after up-close demonstration instructions, Rhee emphasizes that he neither measured nor tasted the dishes before serving them. This isn’t to brag, but to instill confidence in his students that cooking by the basic principles will work.

Keeping it simple…and delicious

Those principles are the product of a well-traveled palate and of more than 25 years’ experience in restaurants–“from mop to top,” Rhee says. He now prefers teaching to the restaurant life, and was at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Massachusetts, a non-profit community service organization, before arriving in Hawaii seven years ago.

Rhee has a master’s degree in food science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “I not only give recipes,” he says, “but also explain the science behind it.”

He’s a scientist by nature, it seems, and earned his bachelor’s degree in marine biology, of all things, from Cornell University. Rhee’s punchline: “I realized I liked eating my research subjects more than the research itself.”

In teaching the popular dish chap chae, Rhee starts by soaking one bunch of dried Korean long rice.

“If you’re impatient,” he explains, “you can put the noodles in a porcelain bowl with cold water and zap it in the microwave for eight minutes.”

He then juliennes equal amounts of carrots, onions, green onions, re-hydrated shiitake mushrooms, thinly sliced ribeye and egg omelette, sharing tips along the way, such as recommending cutting a thin slice of carrot off and laying that side down to create a level cutting surface. Rhee explains that Korean cooking usually employs five colors, and you see the harmony of colors laid out on the plate where all the julienned ingredients have been arranged.

Asking students to hold their hands above the pan to get a sense of a good pre-heating temperature, Rhee then oils the pan with “whatever oil is on sale…but not olive or sesame oil,” as those two have lower burning temperatures. He throws in the julienned items all at once, stirring constantly with a wooden spatula–“metal affects the taste of food”–until the beef is half-way cooked. He then adds the softened long rice and stirs until the noodles become clear. Using a mixture of soy sauce, water, garlic, onion and green onion made in the beginning of class (one of the two basic Korean sauces, with the other being based on the hot red pepper paste, gojuchang), Rhee adds enough to achieve the desired color of the chap chae. The last step is to drizzle enough sesame oil to taste. This is the only dish that doesn’t yield any leftovers at the end of class.

Rhee uses this kind of up-close instruction and tip-sharing for bugolgi, barbecue pork, spicy rice cakes, rice cake soup, mandoo and more. With a mixture of feeling full (very full) and having the strong desire to cook, you’ll be treated to a tour of Palama Market from Rhee after class, allowing for instant application for what you’ve just learned. While you may be too full to cook anything on the same night, you’ll soon be dreaming of of cooking up a Korean feast, and Rhee’s guidance makes it doable.

Classes Rhee has offered in the past include 19-minute Asian meals, kimchi dishes, basic Vietnamese cooking and Korean-Chinese dishes. Rhee is always thinking up other types of Asian cooking classes and gladly takes suggestions from students. So now it’s your turn to become an Asian cooking master–or at least know that Korean long rice is made out of sweet potato starch.