Doubanjiang vs Gochujang
The short answer
Two fermented red pastes built on chilli and a fermented legume, and not interchangeable. Doubanjiang is Sichuan’s: salted chillies and mould-fermented broad beans, salty and savoury. Gochujang is Korea’s: chilli powder, glutinous rice and fermented soybean, and distinctly sweet, because its fermentation turns rice starch into sugar. Doubanjiang is fried in oil at the start of a dish as its seasoning. Swapping one for the other changes the salt and the sweetness of the dish, not only its heat.
Side by side
| Doubanjiang | Gochujang | |
|---|---|---|
| Defining ingredients | Fresh red chillies, salted and fermented, Broad beans, fermented with a mould starter, salt | Gochugaru (Korean chilli powder), Glutinous rice, usually as a cooked syrup or powder, Fermented soybean powder (meju garu), salt, Barley or wheat malt (yeotgireum) |
| Origin | Sichuan, in south-western China. The paste the literature describes is Pixian douban, named for Pixian, which one study places in the Pidu district of Chengdu, and a protected geographical indication in China; one study adds that it is listed as national intangible cultural heritage. Food scientists describe it as valued as a seasoning for several centuries and its traditional process as hundreds of years old; none of the papers read gives a date or a first maker. | Korea, where gochujang is one of the three traditional fermented pastes — with doenjang and ganjang — that underpin the cuisine. Chillies reached the peninsula in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, so gochujang as it now exists is younger than that, while the fermented soybean tradition it is built on is very much older. |
| Cuisines | Chinese | Korean |
| Heat | Moderate. It is as much a salty, savoury seasoning as a hot one. | Moderate, and much lower than a paste this red suggests. Gochugaru is bred for colour, and Korean manufacturers print a numeric heat grade on the tub. |
| Flavour | Salty and deeply savoury, with chilli heat and a fermented, soy-sauce-like aroma, in a reddish-brown paste. Tasting panels in the studies describe its smell as soy-sauce-like, mellow and sour and its taste as salty, delicate and faintly citric. The savouriness comes from amino acids released as the bean protein breaks down; citric acid is its most abundant organic acid. In an aroma study of three aged pastes the compounds that counted most were described as caramel-like, fruity and red-pepper-like. The beans darken as they ferment, so colour as well as smell deepens with time. | Sweet, savoury and hot simultaneously, with a fermented depth underneath that no dry blend reproduces. The sweetness is malty rather than sugary in a long-fermented paste and frankly sugary in a fast one, and that difference is the clearest way to tell them apart by taste. |
| Aroma | Not established | Not established |
Which should you buy?
Doubanjiang
In the Pixian paste the ingredients are fixed (chilli, broad beans, salt and wheat flour) and what varies is the fermentation. Traditionally the mash ferments outdoors in strip pools or ceramic vats, open to sun, air and weather, which gives a strong flavour that differs from batch to batch. Factories have begun to move it into closed tanks for consistency. A comparison of the two from one producer, using the same raw materials, found the closed product stronger in soy-sauce aroma and savouriness and richer in esters, and the open one richer in higher alcohols, terpenes and sulphur compounds. Age is the other variable: one study describes the paste as usually ripened for one to three years, and another analysed pastes sold as two, three and five years old. Outside Sichuan the ingredients vary too: the chilli bean paste of Guizhou is made with no flour.
Gochujang
Wide, and along axes that a dry blend does not have. Traditional gochujang varies by the grain used — glutinous rice is standard, but barley, wheat and sweet potato versions all exist regionally — by the length of the fermentation, and by the proportion of chilli, which sets a heat level manufacturers now grade numerically. Commercial paste differs more fundamentally: most of it is made in weeks rather than months using added sweeteners such as corn syrup in place of the sugar a long fermentation generates, which produces a sweeter, shallower paste. Neither is a fake; they are a slow product and a fast one.
Full detail on doubanjiang and gochujang, including evidence grades and sources for every claim above.