The Best Things to Buy at H Mart (2025)

Korean American grocery store H Mart is a source of inspiration. It’s a refuge for Michelle Zauner, author of New York Times best-seller Crying in H Mart, and the perfect place to gather ingredients for plenty of Korean recipes.

For H Mart beginners, it can be overwhelming navigating the packed shelves and endless varieties for the best things to buy. That's why we spoke to three tastemakers and H Mart veterans for their advice and go-to buys. Here's what they always add to their carts.

Remy Morimoto Park

Remy Morimoto Park first found her way to cooking as a method of healing a bad relationship with food. She founded her food blog, Veggiekins, as a way to help people curious about what vegan recipes are possible. Her family spent time living in New York, Taiwan, China, Korea and Thailand, and that multicultural experience drives her fusion approach to Vegan cooking.

“A couple of my favorite ways to cook now are sort of infusing the flavors and condiments that are distinctly Korean, for example, and adding it to Italian food, or mixing Mexican and Japanese,” Park says.

Park shops at H Mart once a week to find Asian staples and take advantage of a wider selection of produce. She says it’s the only place where she can find certain ingredients she needs not only at a better price, but with a more authentic flavor than “Western-facing versions.”

“I really find that going to Asian stores directly or to H Mart, specifically, is the easiest way for me to find exactly what I grew up with,” Park says. “Same brand, same packaging. I don't have to worry about whether or not the recipe is gonna taste right, because it's exactly what I grew up with.”

Shop Park's Staples

Park uses these rice cakes as a “more textural form of Korean pasta.” These vegan, naturally gluten-free rice cakes are typically available fresh as a snack or frozen for later use. They’re an incredibly versatile base ingredient and come in several varieties. Park describes the cylindrical versions as a “something in between penne and gnocchi” and loves to use them for stir-fry or tteokbokki. The oval, flat, moon-shaped rice cakes are great as a noodle replacement for soups.

Gochujang is a staple condiment in Korean cooking. The fermented red chili pepper paste has a spicy reputation, but beyond its heat has salty and savory tastes. “When you add it to a dish, especially one with tomatoes, I find it's delicious,” Park says. “So I like to think of it as a Korean Calabrian chili pepper paste.” Park uses it anywhere she’d use chili flakes and loves to get it in bigger, family-size tubs at H Mart.

As a vegan, Park loves being able to find more than one type of tofu or tempeh. When making sundubu, a Korean soft tofu stew, Park prefers a silken tofu, “the type that will kind of fall apart the second you touch it.” Extra firm, high-protein tofu is better for stir fry, “something you’re cooking with more roughness where you need something that will hold its shape.”

Park’s go-to replacement for the anchovy stock used so commonly in Korean cooking is Yondu. The vegetable-based starter base is a delicious vegan replacement when making soups.

First-Timer Advice

“Really take your time. It's almost like going to a museum. Once you familiarize yourself with what's available, you can kind of figure out what is what. Maybe a little bit of research in advance would be helpful to recognize things when you see them at the store.”

Hyosun Ro

Ro has been cooking for over 30 years for a family who loves Korean food. When she started her website Korean Bapsang in 2009, she wanted to share food the way she cooks it at home. “Because I was a busy mom, I just always wanted to make good food the simplest possible way,” Ro says.

Ro will split her time between H Mart and Lotte Market, but she’s a frequent shopper at both. Whether she’s making doenjang-jjigae for herself and her husband, or bossam lettuce wraps with kimchi for her kids, she stays well-stocked with staples.

Shop Ro’s Staples

Ro says the most important things to have in your pantry are three base Korean seasonings: gochujang, doenjang (a fermented soybean paste) and soup soy sauce (a saltier version than the traditional Kikkoman, made as a byproduct of doenjang). These three essentials are among Ro's frequent H Mart buys.

From a health perspective, Ro isn’t quick to buy snacks at H Mart, but loves nostalgic treats that remind her of her childhood. “I'm 65, I need to be careful with what I eat, of course,” Ro says. “I don't buy a lot of junk food. When my daughter's here, she goes to H Mart with me and she brings back a lot of Korean snacks.”

First-Timer Advice

Start with starchy staples. “There’s lots of dry noodles that are used in Korean cooking, but the japchae noodles would be something really nice to have in the pantry. Obviously it's mainly used for Japchae, but you can throw it into stew or soups.”

JinJoo Lee

When JinJoo Lee founded her food blog Kimchimari in 2010, she’d found herself at a midlife turning point. As her daughter headed off to college, she suggested JinJoo start a blog of her recipes. Lee figured the recipes would be useful for her daughter, but later realized that there was a greater demand for these recipes from Korean-American kids.

“They don't get a chance to really learn cooking from their mom a lot of times, and then Moms also tell me it's hard because of the language difficulty,” Lee says. “Most Korean moms don't really write down recipes. They just do it by eye and feel, so they said it's really hard to teach them how to cook over the phone.”

Lee combined a lifelong love for food and a computer science background to bring procedure to recipes often measured from the heart. She shops at H Mart once or twice a week, even more so when developing recipes.

Shop Lee’s Staples

Lee loves to have cuts of Korean meat such as bulgogi or galbi on hand, plus radish, cabbages and green onions. Imported vegetables from Korea are Lee’s favorite to buy from H Mart, particularly radishes born in the rich volcanic soil of Jeju Island.

“Everything that's grown on that island, it's so delicious,” Lee says. “So the radish that they bring from there is especially juicy and nice. When that happens, I always make sure I make some nice kimchi with it.”

When preparing soups and stews, Lee will buy dried anchovies for soup broth. Korean sea salt makes a difference in kimchi preparation. For the days she wants something a little easier, Pulmuone’s frozen mandu dumplings and udon noodle soups are essentials.

Korean snacks stay on Lee’s shelf, from the classic Choco Pie to shrimp crackers and roasted seaweed. Salty and sweet crackers such as Gosomi and Honey Twist are some of Lee’s favorites.

First-Timer Advice

Seasonings and dried foods are where people get lost, look into that first. For gochujang in particular, avoid ones where the first ingredient is corn syrup (a tell-tale sign that it’s just a mix of ingredients rather than a properly fermented paste.) For vegetables, if you can find ones that are directly from Korea, that’s your best bet, for lettuce in particular.

Find your closest H Mart here and take your support of AAPI food brands beyond the H Mart shelves.

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