For Koreans, the perfect dessert is ‘not too sweet.’ But what does that actually mean?

Sit down at any cafe in Seoul with a slice of cake between two people, wait for the first bite, and listen for the verdict. It will almost never be that the cake is delicious. The compliment given to the dessert will be that it’s tasty “because it isn’t too sweet.”

This comes attached to a handful of near-synonyms: “it doesn’t taste like you’ll get sick of it even if you eat a lot,” or "dambaek-hada," clean and unfussy; or that the taste is “tidy.” Together they are the standard Korean vocabulary for praising a dessert, and every description is built on an absence — of sweetness.

Koreans' penchant for less sweet desserts, shared by other Asian countries, may seem peculiar because other foods — such as bulgogi, galbi (marinated meat), japchae (stir-fried noodles) and tteokbokki (spicy rice cakes) — are often considered sweet compared to global cuisine. Recipes for such Korean dishes actually call for a significant amount of sugar or sweetened syrup.

So how did the highest compliment a Korean can give to a dessert become "not too sweet"? Does the compliment actually describe the flavor — or something else entirely?

What 'not too sweet' actually means

The complimentary phrases handed to desserts have changed shape in the past few years.

“What I hear these days isn’t ‘it’s good because it isn’t sweet,’ so much as ‘it isn’t sweet and it’s good’ — those are different sentences,” said Cho Han-bit, a pâtissier with a cookie shop in Bukchon, central Seoul, who trained at Nakamura, a Seoul-based Japanese culinary academy, and Lenôtre, a French pastry brand with its own school.

Nobody is looking for a completely unsweet dessert, Cho said — everyone expects sugar. "If it lands where they expect, that's good. Past that line is when they call it too sweet."

So the compliment is not a demand to remove sweetness; it marks the boundary between an expected level of indulgence and excess.

Ask the people making desserts what is being praised, and none of them say that it’s sweet flavor.

“It’s one of the most frequent verdicts we get from the restaurant floor, but what the customer means by ‘not sweet’ isn’t simply that there’s less sugar in it,” said Lim Hyun-ho, executive pastry chef at Sofitel Ambassador Seoul. 

“It’s closer to saying they could enjoy it comfortably to the last bite, and that the ingredients’ own character comes through. Customers think about balance now, more than sweetness.”

Balance of tastes, rather than a lack of sugar itself, was what many pâtissiers and chefs identified as customers’ meaning.

Chef Kim Ja-eun, who runs the YouTube baking channel J’adore and now runs a dessert shop in New York, has heard the “not too sweet” compliment often enough to know what it means.

“That one sentence has several compliments in it — the sweetness isn’t covering the other flavors, it doesn’t sit heavy, you can eat to the end without tiring of it. It sounds less like praise for the absence of sugar than praise for balance," Kim said.

“Not too sweet,” in other words, is the ordinary customer’s term for what a pastry chef might call "balance."

Reaching that balance

Chefs and pâtissiers trained abroad often bring their recipes to Korea, only to have them overhauled to strike the balance Korean dessert eaters seek. Rarely does this simply mean cutting the sugar content.

Sung Myung-ju, who graduated from the prestigious culinary institution Le Cordon Bleu in France, puts numbers on the difference. European desserts generally sit around 40 Brix, the measure of the dissolved sugar in a liquid, while the fruit-and-fresh-cream cake that anchors the Korean market runs 25 to 30, she says — and Korean customers have long registered anything at 40 to 45 as sweet.

Sung developed dessert products at Korea's SPC Group before launching the Korean branch of the French culinary school École Lenôtre in 2002.

She said she noticed a common request when consulting bakeries in Korea. They all want to put loads of toppings on the baked goods that cut the sweetness. 

"They prefer baked goods with a lot of topping over the small, cream-heavy mousse cakes — something where the sponge shows, a soft castella with the cream hidden inside," she said. "With baked goods too, a plain one won't do. You have to top it with figs or pecans or macadamias for customers to like it, and when that gets chewed together with the rest, the sweetness comes down."

Pâtissier Cho, whose signature item is meringue — a dessert known for high sugar content — had difficulty adjusting his own recipe for Korean customers.

“You can’t just adjust the recipe — change the sugar ratio and the texture changes completely. So we launched a new meringue line at 40 percent instead," he said. 

Sweetness is not the only complaint the recipes come home with. Koreans object to heaviness on much the same terms, and the fix is often the same.

Lee Geon-ho, who studied at Le Cordon Bleu in France and worked at Pierre Hermé before opening the bakery On The in the trendy Seongsu-dong neighborhood of Seongdong District, southern Seoul, says his early caramel tart dessert came back with complaints that it sat too heavy. He had to raise the salt content and add lemon zest to cut the heaviness of the caramel cream while not disturbing the balance.

A question of portion

While the pâtissiers and chefs explain the mechanisms to make “not too sweet” desserts, exactly why Koreans want such adjustments in the first place is a matter of portion and how many dessert items are dealt with on the table.

“North American dessert has to be intensely sweet, because the point is to close the meal by switching to a completely different taste,” said Ham Seon-ok, a professor of food and nutrition at Yonsei University who lived in the United States for 20 years.

“They give you two small squares of something very strong, with coffee or tea. They have no word for mullida [a Korean expression describing ‘getting sick of’ a taste] over there, because the portion is small enough that you never get there.”

Ham’s point is less that every dessert in the United States is tiny than that Western dessert developed as a distinct final course. Its purpose is separation: after savory food, dessert marks the end of the meal through an unmistakable change in flavor. A small but concentrated serving of chocolate, caramel or cream can perform that role precisely because it is not intended to continue the meal. Korean dessert, however, arrived by another route, and at another size, the professor argued.

“Our after-meal course was fruit for a very long time, and we ate a lot of it because there wasn’t anything else, so when other things came in, the portion stayed large,” said Ham. “Ours isn’t a Western dessert portion — it’s nearly half a meal. The volume is what produces ‘too sweet.’”

Traditional Korean meals did not end with an everyday European-style pastry course. Fruit, rice cakes, sweet drinks or small preserved foods might follow, but the English word “dessert” and the Korean concept of husik, or after-meal food, were never exact equivalents.

When cakes and pastries became common in Korea, they entered that broad category while also becoming snacks, celebration foods, gifts, cafe purchases and occasional meal replacements.

Sung puts it down to the shape of a Korean meal.

“Dessert hasn’t fully seeped into our table culture yet,” she said. “We eat rice and soup and side dishes and finish with a plum ade or one small, preserved thing.”

So the large-sized dessert items, the late-adaptation of dessert on Korean tables and the cafe culture may be why Koreans are so particular about things being “not too sweet.”

A Korean thing at all?

Whether the preference for “not too sweet” desserts is a wholly Korean thing at all is difficult to gauge. When the food magazine Eater examined the spread of lightly sweetened fruit cream cakes across Asian bakeries, it cited research finding no compelling evidence that Asian consumers as a group prefer less-sweet food.

The YouTube pâtissier Kim, who encountered the same reflex among other East Asian customers after moving to the United States, says the phrase is one case of a much broader Korean habit.

“When we talk about food, we rate a flavor positively for not being excessive — dambaek-hada, not greasy, not aggressive,” she said. “In dessert that just comes out as ‘it’s good because it isn’t too sweet.’”

The same Korean consumers who claim to like “not too sweet” desserts have made hits of tanghulu, or skewered fruit coated in a hardened sugar syrup, and Dubai chocolate, which makes the aversion look situational, according to Kim.

Lee, the Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef of On The, thinks Korea is a harder case than its neighbors.

“Across Asia there’s a similar wariness about sweetness, but Korea is unusual in how strongly it treats a clean finish as the standard of sophistication,” he said. “Koreans on a two-day trip abroad go hunting for a Korean restaurant or the instant noodles they packed. They can’t tolerate that stuck feeling of richness — they need the kimchi or the broth before they feel alive again.”

Prof. Ham thinks the compliment is actually a complaint in the wrong place. It isn’t that dessert has been toned down, it’s that Korean food as a whole is already sweet — she once went to a famous bulgogi restaurant and thought the meat had been ladled out of sugar soup.

Cho and Kim both push the point further. A Western main course is savory, so a sweet ending is a genuine reversal; a Korean one already carries sugar in the bulgogi, the japchae, the tteokbokki and the sauce on the fried chicken, which leaves the dessert with nothing to reverse.

So the compliment is not doing what it looks like it is doing.

“To make a dessert that tastes not too sweet and still tastes like something, you take the sugar down to the line where it stops harming the product and the texture and flavor hold there anyway,” Cho, the Seoul-based pâtissier, said. “That is the chef’s skill. The praise has nothing to do with sugar.”

Sung, the pâtissier with experience at SPC, suspects the wording will catch up eventually.

“Before long, people won’t be saying a dessert is good because it isn’t sweet,” she said. “They will be saying the balance is right.”

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]