a sauceYangnyeom sauce

A sweet and spicy glaze built on gochujang — a fermented Korean paste of red chili powder, glutinous rice, fermented soybean powder, barley malt powder and salt — with garlic, sugar and other seasonings. Painted onto fried chicken with a brush after the fryer, in a thin even coat rather than a toss. Yangnyeom chicken is the dish; this is what makes it.

Yun Jonggye started it in 1982, at a fried chicken restaurant in Daegu that later became Mexican Chicken. He noticed customers struggling with the hard, crisp layers of fried chicken — scraped palates among the complaints — and decided to soften the shell by marinating the bird sweet and spicy.

The ground was already laid. Frying chicken in Korea goes back centuries; pogye (포계) in the early Joseon dynasty was sautéed in oil with soy sauce, sesame oil, flour-and-water and vinegar poured on in turn. Chicken-eating took off in the late 1960s when Myeongdong Yeongyang Center began selling whole chicken roasted over an electric oven, and US military presence after the Korean War brought deep-frying. The first modern franchise, Lims Chicken, opened in 1977 in the basement of the Shinsegae Department Store on Chungmu-ro in Seoul. Beer made it a habit: chimaek, from chicken and maekju.

Gochujang itself is older than the chile in it. Pepper paste appears in Korean texts from 1433 and 1445, before chili peppers reached Korea — Portuguese traders brought those to East Asia in the early 16th century. Sunchang gochujang has been a regional speciality since the 14th century.

Julia Moskin of The New York Times called yangnyeom chicken "the apotheosis of the Korean style" of fried chicken. By 2026 there were 40,000 fried chicken restaurants in South Korea and 1,800 more run internationally by Korean brands in sixty countries.

Double-fry first, so the crust can take a wet coat without going soft. Warm the sauce, then hand-paint it on with a brush — the point is a thin layer over the whole bird rather than a soaked one. Serve with pickled radish and beer. Half-and-half orders get one sauce and one plain in the same box.

Made in-house at Korean fried chicken shops and sold bottled by several importers. As of 16 September 2026 the USDA label panel for Roland Spicy Gochujang Korean BBQ Sauce reads 469 mg sodium and 7 g sugar in a 2-tablespoon serving — 234 mg and 3.5 g in one tablespoon, with red pepper paste second. Nobody publishes a Scoville number. Gochujang has its own scale, the Gochujang hot-taste unit, measured by chromatography of capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin and sorted into five levels from Mild to Extreme Hot — but that rates the paste, not a finished sauce.