The real challenge isn't removing meat
Ask someone unfamiliar with Korean food what a vegan version of it would require, and the answer usually starts and ends with swapping proteins. Replace the pork in bulgogi with mushrooms, skip the beef in the stew, done. That framing misses almost everything that actually makes Korean cooking taste like Korean cooking.
Most of the depth in Korean food doesn't come from meat at all. It comes from fermentation, from doenjang, gochujang, and ganjang built over months or years through the slow work of soybeans, salt, and time. Meat contributes texture and richness, but the flavor architecture underneath nearly every stew, marinade, and side dish is already, structurally, plant based.
That fact changes the entire conversation around vegan Korean food. The real work isn't figuring out what to remove. It's making sure that fermented foundation survives the transition intact, since losing it would mean losing the thing that makes the food recognizably Korean in the first place.
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| No meat on the plate, but the marinade is doing exactly what it always did. |
Why fermented pastes were never the problem
Traditional doenjang and gochujang are made from fermented soybeans, salt, and in gochujang's case, chili and glutinous rice. None of that requires an animal product. A jar of properly made doenjang sitting in a Korean pantry has been vegan the entire time, long before anyone attached that label to it.
The complication tends to show up elsewhere, in stock. Many restaurant versions of doenjang jjigae or kimchi jjigae are built on an anchovy or beef based broth, added not because the paste requires it but because it deepens the stew further. That broth is where a dish quietly stops being vegan, even though its core seasoning never left plant based territory.
Recognizing that distinction matters, because it means adapting these dishes for vegan diners isn't a matter of reformulating the flavor base from scratch. It's a matter of rebuilding the broth around vegetables, dried mushroom, and kelp instead of anchovy, while leaving the paste that defines the dish's actual character completely untouched.
What replaces meat without replacing the point
Mushrooms have become the most common substitute in vegan Korean cooking, and not arbitrarily. King oyster mushrooms, sliced thin and marinated, pick up a marinade's soy and garlic notes readily and develop a chew that, while not identical to beef, holds up well against the same sweet, savory bulgogi sauce that traditionally coats meat.
Dried shiitake plays a different role, contributing umami depth to broths and stews rather than serving as a textural stand-in. Rehydrated and simmered, it releases a savory quality that helps compensate for the absence of an anchovy or beef based stock, working alongside kelp to build a broth with genuine backbone rather than something thin or one-dimensional.
Tofu remains central as well, not as a novelty addition but because it already occupied a major role in Korean cooking long before veganism became a framing point. Soft tofu in jjigae, pressed tofu in banchan, none of that required adaptation. It simply needed the surrounding broth to catch up to what the tofu itself never stopped being.
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| These two pastes are still vegan by nature. Nothing about them needed to change. |
Bulgogi and jjigae, reconsidered rather than reinvented
Plant based bulgogi illustrates this approach clearly. The marinade, soy sauce, pear, garlic, sesame oil, sugar, stays essentially unchanged from its traditional form, since none of those ingredients were ever meat dependent to begin with. What changes is the substrate absorbing that marinade, typically king oyster mushroom or sometimes seitan, sliced and prepared to hold the sauce the way thin cuts of beef traditionally would.
The result doesn't attempt to taste identical to meat bulgogi, and treating that as the goal tends to produce disappointing results. Instead, it aims to deliver the same marinade experience, sweet, savory, faintly smoky from the sesame oil, on a different but genuinely satisfying textural base.
Doenjang jjigae follows a similar logic. The paste stays exactly as it always was. The broth shifts from anchovy stock to a vegetable and mushroom based version, and the tofu, zucchini, and mushroom that typically fill out the stew require no substitution at all, since they were already vegan components sitting inside a dish that only needed its broth reconsidered.
Where the real difficulty still shows up
Fish sauce and salted shrimp remain the hardest ingredients to work around, particularly in kimchi. Traditional kimchi often relies on jeotgal, fermented seafood, to build depth and aid fermentation, and removing it entirely changes both the flavor and, to some degree, the fermentation process itself.
Vegan kimchi recipes have adapted by leaning more heavily on ingredients like kelp broth, soy sauce, or occasionally a small amount of fruit to help drive the fermentation and build umami without seafood. The result is recognizably kimchi, tangy, spicy, alive with active fermentation, though a longtime kimchi eater might notice a slightly different depth compared to a jeotgal based version.
This is really the honest tension at the center of vegan Korean cooking. Most of it translates cleanly, since the plant based foundation was already there. A smaller set of dishes, kimchi chief among them, requires a genuine compromise, and pretending otherwise doesn't do anyone any favors.
Why this adaptation feels different from a typical vegan reinterpretation
Vegan versions of many global cuisines often involve building flavor from ingredients that weren't traditionally part of the dish at all, nutritional yeast standing in for cheese, for example. Vegan Korean food rarely needs that kind of substitution, because the flavor system it's built on, fermented soy, was never dependent on animal products in the first place.
That makes the adaptation feel less like an approximation and more like a return to what a large portion of Korean cooking already was, underneath the meat and the anchovy stock that sat on top of it. A well made vegan doenjang jjigae isn't a workaround. It's arguably closer to what doenjang jjigae tastes like at its most fundamental level.
For someone trying vegan Korean food for the first time expecting a diluted or approximate version of the real thing, that distinction tends to be the most surprising part. The fermented base carrying most of the dish's identity was never the obstacle. It was already sitting there, ready to do exactly what it's always done.
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| Nothing about this bowl announces that it's vegan. It just tastes like doenjang jjigae. |
Trying it without treating it as a compromise
Starting with doenjang jjigae tends to be the easiest entry point, since the paste requires no substitution and only the broth needs attention. A version built on kelp and dried shiitake broth, filled with tofu, zucchini, and mushroom, delivers something close to a familiar bowl without demanding any specialty ingredients most kitchens don't already stock.
Bulgogi with king oyster mushroom offers a similarly approachable next step, particularly for anyone who already enjoys the marinade's flavor profile independent of what it's coating. The sauce does most of the work, and the mushroom simply needs enough surface area and thin slicing to absorb it properly.
Kimchi remains the one area worth approaching with realistic expectations rather than assuming an identical result. A vegan version will taste like kimchi, tangy, crisp, and fermented, but a longtime eater of the traditional version may notice the missing depth that jeotgal usually provides. That's a reasonable tradeoff to accept going in, not a flaw to be surprised by later.
What connects all of this is a simple, easily overlooked fact. Korean food didn't need to be rebuilt to accommodate a vegan diner. It mostly needed its broth reconsidered, while the fermented core that actually defines the flavor stayed exactly where it's always been.
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