At 9 a.m. on a Saturday in late spring, Sam Park separates six eggs at the counter of his apartment in Yeonnam-dong, central Seoul. The whites go into a small glass jar for whatever cooking he does over the next forty-eight hours. The yolks go into a shallow ceramic dish where they will sit, half-buried in salt, for the next four days.
He has done this most weekends since 2019, when a chef friend in Hapjeong showed him the technique over a long afternoon and a bottle of soju.
The dish he uses is a rectangular celadon piece bought at the Insadong antique market for twelve thousand won in 2016. It is roughly twenty centimetres by twelve, and three centimetres deep. He likes its weight in the refrigerator. He likes the way the salt sits flat in it.
He fills it about two-thirds with kosher salt — the same Diamond Crystal that everyone in his cookbook collection seems to recommend — mixed in equal parts with white sugar. The sugar tempers the salt's harshness and contributes to the texture of the finished yolk.
He spreads the salt-sugar mixture flat with the back of a spoon and presses six small indentations into it with the back of a clean egg.
Into each indentation he lowers a yolk, carefully, from the cup of an eggshell half. The yolks should not break. If one does, he sets it aside for cooking and replaces it with a fresh egg.
He covers the yolks with the remaining salt-sugar mixture, enough to bury each one completely. The dish is heavy with cure.
He covers the whole thing with plastic wrap and puts it on the second shelf of his refrigerator, where it will stay, undisturbed, for four days.
In four days the yolks have transformed. They have given up most of their water to the cure and become firm, slightly tacky, the texture and translucency of an orange gummy candy. They no longer feel like raw yolks. They feel like an ingredient.
He brushes off the salt with a soft pastry brush, rinses each yolk briefly under cold water, and pats them dry with a paper towel.
The next step is the drying. He has tried several methods over the years. The one he has settled on is the simplest: a small wire rack set inside a sheet pan, the yolks placed on the rack, the whole thing left in the refrigerator uncovered for an additional three to five days.
Some recipes call for a low oven — 65 degrees Celsius for two hours — and he has done that and found it acceptable but slightly compromised. The yolks dried in the oven take on a faint cooked flavour. The refrigerator-dried yolks taste cleaner.
After three days in the refrigerator the yolks have shrunk by about a third. They are the colour of marigolds and the consistency of a hard cheese. They will hold this state in a sealed container for about a month.
He grates them.
A Microplane is the right tool. He grates a yolk over a bowl of steamed rice with a single sheet of toasted gim and a drizzle of sesame oil. He grates one over al dente bucatini with butter and black pepper. He grates one over a thick slice of beefsteak tomato in midsummer with a few flakes of Maldon and a leaf of basil torn over the top.
The flavour is concentrated, salty, deeply rich, with the faintest sweetness from the sugar in the cure. It is closer to a fine grated cheese than to an egg, but it does not taste of cheese. It tastes of itself.
He keeps the cured yolks in a small lidded jar in the door of the refrigerator. Each one weighs about six grams and gives him three or four good gratings.
Six yolks last him about three weeks. He starts a new batch the weekend before he runs out.
The whole project, he notes, has almost no active work — perhaps fifteen minutes total spread across a week. Most of the labour is waiting. Most of the equipment is already in any kitchen.
He has served the cured yolks to guests perhaps a dozen times over the years and has noticed that nearly everyone, on the first taste, asks for the recipe. He explains the technique and watches their interest fade somewhere around day four. The waiting, he thinks, is the part most people are not prepared for.
Those who are prepared find that the salted yolk becomes one of those small, durable pleasures of a working kitchen. A garnish always at hand, a flavour at the back of a Wednesday dinner that turns it into something else. He thinks of it as the cheapest luxury he produces.
