Shared Flavors , Shared Memories
The Best Cake in the World
The best cake in the world isn’t sweet. It’s wrapped in seaweed and made with love.
The best cake in the world isn’t sweet. It’s wrapped in seaweed and made with love.
On school trip days, I woke early, already excited. Even before I opened my eyes, I could hear clinking sounds from the kitchen. My mom had started at five in the morning, preparing our dosirak (도시락), lunchboxes.
On days like this, she would put in extra effort, not just to feed us, but to make it beautiful as well. She wanted her son and daughter to feel proud when they opened their lunchboxes, confident that theirs would stand out among the many others filled with gimbap (김밥). And there were many. For school trips, gimbap was the unspoken rule.
I’m not exaggerating when I say this memory will feel familiar to many people my age. These days, I hear that busy parents often preorder gimbap for school trips. Still, the formula hasn’t changed: school trip equals gimbap. Homemade or not, it’s expected.
By the time my mom finished rolling the gimbap, my brother and I were already hovering nearby. We watched as she sliced and arranged the pieces neatly in the lunchbox, adjusting the rows, adding small garnishes so everything looked just right.
And then came the best part: the end pieces.
They weren’t pretty enough for a lunchbox, so they became our instant breakfast. A little uneven, heavier on the fillings, eaten straight from the cutting board. Like the crispy corner of a lasagna pan, the part that never gets plated, but everyone wants.
My mom, ever creative, once took it a step further. For a birthday, she made a gimbap cake, three round layers of gimbap stacked neatly, tied with ribbons. Instead of blowing out candles, we untied the ribbon and ate it together, alongside miyeok-guk (미역국), the seaweed soup traditionally eaten on birthdays in Korea.
I didn’t realize until much later how deeply that gesture would stay with me. Like the time my husband stacked oysters in their shells and served them as a birthday “cake,” knowing how little I care for sweets, and how much I miss fresh oysters living in a landlocked country where they’re hard to come by.
That kind of care stays with me. Making something special with what you have. Paying attention. Turning food into a gesture rather than a formality. I think that’s why I keep making gimbap stacks for neighborhood gatherings and dinner parties, not because they’re elaborate, but because they carry that same intention.
Gimbap literally means seaweed and rice: gim (김) + bap (밥). There are countless variations depending on ingredients and shape, but at its most basic, rice and seaweed alone already qualify as gimbap.
Growing up, my father would set the table with rice and seaweed. And I’d make each roll myself, one bite at a time, using freshly roasted gim, warm plain rice, and a little yangnyeom ganjang (양념간장) drizzled on top. It was what we ate when there were no prepared banchan (반찬) in the fridge. Modest, but deeply satisfying.
There is also a version where the gim itself is seasoned, brushed lightly with sesame oil, either chamgireum (참기름) or deulgireum (들기름), and sprinkled with salt. This seasoned seaweed, known as jomigim (조미김), has more recently become popular in the West as a standalone snack, eaten straight, without rice at all.
I once showed my husband how Koreans often eat rice wrapped in gim: scooping rice with chopsticks, pressing it onto the seaweed so it sticks, then wrapping and eating it in one smooth motion. He tried for a moment, then gave up and placed the gim directly on his palm, rolling it by hand instead.
I laughed, not because he was doing it wrong, but because it felt oddly familiar. Using the palm like that is something I’d seen plenty of Koreans do, even if I hadn’t expected to see it from him. It reminded me that there are many ways to wrap rice with gim. Most Westerners I know would lay the seaweed flat on a plate to assemble it carefully, not roll it directly in their hand the way he did.
Korea isn’t the only place where people eat rice and seaweed this way. At a dinner party hosted by a Japanese friend, she prepared a temaki (手巻き) setup: rice, fish, seaweed, where everyone rolled their own by hand. What stayed with me wasn’t the format, but an unexpected filling on the table: gerookte haringfilet, smoked herring.
It was brilliant, an unlikely but satisfying combination. Using smoked herring, something so readily available in Dutch supermarkets, and folding it into a Japanese-style home-cooked meal felt both practical and creative.
Seeing smoked herring wrapped in seaweed immediately reminded me of gwamegi (과메기) back home, semi-dried Pacific saury or herring eaten with garlic stems and green onions wrapped in gim in Korea. Inspired by that connection, I began adding green onions and garlic stems to the mix. Since then, wrapping hollandse nieuwe this way has become one of my go-to dinner-party dishes.
Gimbap changes easily, but it follows a quiet structure. The most familiar fillings show up again and again: pickled radish, ham, braised burdock root, spinach, carrots, fish cake, cucumber, imitation crab, and egg. Each one is cooked on its own, braised, pickled, or stir-fried, then sliced into long strips that line up neatly with the sheet of seaweed.
→ Read more about common ingredients of gimbap and how they are prepared
Once you move beyond these basics, the naming becomes straightforward. Add tuna, and it’s tuna gimbap. Add bulgogi (불고기), bulgogi gimbap. Cheese becomes cheese gimbap. The structure stays the same; the filling tells the story.
→ Read more about gimbap variations and how they get named
Just as I adapted my kimchi depending on where I lived, I began adapting my gimbap to place and people.
When cooking for friends who didn’t eat meat, I simply left the protein out. Gimbap allows for that kind of flexibility. Sometimes I added braised tofu in sweet soy sauce, not something you’d typically find in Korea, but something that made sense at my table.
When burdock root was hard to find, I started experimenting. In the Netherlands, carrots were abundant and came in varieties I hadn’t grown up with: purple, yellow, pale white. Through trial and error, I learned that some of them could mimic the texture and subtle earthy flavor of burdock root surprisingly well. It wasn’t the same ingredient, but it carried a familiar bite, enough to make the gimbap feel right again.
Part of gimbap’s appeal is its portability. Like a sandwich, it travels well. Compact, tidy, and meant to be eaten with your hands. Back in the day, there was 천원김밥 (cheon-won gimbap), literally “1,000-won gimbap,” an inexpensive, meant to be filling, portable, and accessible, much like dollar breakfast taco, or street wraps elsewhere in the world. You’d peel back the foil little by little as you ate, the roll staying intact until the last bite, just like how I ate gas-station breakfast tacos in Texas, also wrapped in foil.
I remember standing in a train station just before boarding the Shinkansen, scanning the shelves of boxed meals, beautifully packaged, ready to bring on the train. I couldn’t help but noticing one particular one. The thick slices, the balance of rice and filling, even the overall feel, looked familiar. Not exactly the same, but close enough to make me pause. It reminded me of gimbap. Later, I noticed the label: キンパ風 牛カルビ巻 — Kimbap-style beef short rib roll. Written in a foreign language, yet instantly recognizable.
Seeing it there didn’t make it feel foreign, it made me notice how deeply portable rice was already embedded in how I’d grown up eating. Because 밥 (bap) is the staple in Korean meals, there have been many attempts to make rice portable. Gimbap was one answer, but not the only one. Over time came jumeokbap (주먹밥), rice shaped by hand; 컵밥 (cupbap), rice served in a cup; 삼각김밥 (samgak gimbap), the triangular convenience-store version; and even rice burgers sandwiched between patties.
Each version solves the same problem in a slightly different way: how to carry rice without losing its shape, its warmth, or its comfort. Gimbap just happens to do it with the most grace.
Looking back, those school trip mornings were about more than lunch. They were early lessons in care: waking up early, packing food neatly, making something meant to be carried and shared. Gimbap wasn’t just what we ate; it was how my mother showed love, again and again, using what she had.
Whenever I make gimbap, I think back to those moments. Gathering around my mom as she rolled. The small thrill of opening a neatly packed lunchbox. Food made to travel. Meals prepared with intention. That was how I first learned that food could move with us, from school trips to train stations, from home kitchens to places far away, without losing its meaning.
As I crossed borders, the shapes and names changed. Sometimes the filling was fish, sometimes vegetables, sometimes something entirely new. But none of it felt foreign. What I grew up eating didn’t stay behind. It adapted, reappeared, and made sense again in new places. Gimbap isn’t a fixed dish. It’s a way of thinking about food: practical, flexible, and meant to move, much like memory itself.
