Sacramento food vlogger becomes a homegrown success, with an Asian sensibility

“The BEST” is how popular Sacramento-based food vlogger Seonkyoung Longest captions many of her Asian At Home recipes. Her online cooking videos have amassed a following of around 5 million between YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and her website seonkyounglongest.com.

Longest, 36, is “Jig-up-byeong,” which in Korean, she said, can mean she “is obsessed with what she does and it shows in everyday life.”

Longest doesn’t shy away from having confidence in her recipes because she spends the bulk of her work time researching how to take a recipe her viewers are interested in and make it the most approachable for home cooks. And, no small feat, it has to be consistently delicious. She is able to put herself out there because she has the work ethic and vision to back it up.

The concept for Longest’s brand Asian at Home is “easy and fun,” she said. Her attitude about cooking aligns with a naturally can-do attitude that has taken her from a home cook to a Food Network winner.

Roots on a South Korean organic farm

Growing up in South Korea about an hour from Seoul, she was raised with two working parents who ran an organic farm with an onsite restaurant. Her mother prepared what they produced farm-to-fork style before the concept existed in mainstream consciousness.

“My dad had like 300 pigs and chickens,” said Longest. “He really believed in raising them as organically as possible, feeding them from what was produced from the farm. This was totally organic, non-GMO, stuff like that, before anybody even knew what that was. And my dad was really super into it, so they opened the restaurant at the farm.”

Although she trained to be a cartoonist after high school and moved to Seoul for work at the age of 18, her parents’ legacy became apparent once she turned her creative efforts towards cooking.

“I was raised watching how important the ingredients are, and how important what you eat and put into your body is,” said Longest.

But Longest didn’t begin cooking in earnest until 2009, when she was about 25 years old, after moving to the United States with her husband Jacob, whom she met in Korea while he was stationed there with the Air Force.

They spent nearly six years in the small town of Columbus, Mississippi, where the most reliable place to shop was Walmart. She was one of exactly two Korean people she knew of in the area.

“I moved from Seoul, one of the biggest cities in the world to a tiny town in Mississippi,” said Longest. “Cooking saved my life at the time. I was going through some culture shock, some depression, so I started watching a lot of the Food Network and I started cooking and I realized that cooking really brightens my day and makes me really, really happy.”

Food Network stars give her a start

Longest said the Food Network was easy to follow and entertaining at a time in her life when her English skills were not the best. She was inspired by celebrity chef personalities like Rachel Ray and Ina Garten, aka the Barefoot Contessa.

“Rachel Ray and Ina are two ladies whose recipes never fail,” Longest said, adding that she strives for the same kind of consistency with her work.

Around the time Longest started cooking, YouTube was emerging as a space for people to launch their own creative channels.

“I was like, ‘Oh, why don’t I just upload some videos on YouTube too.’ I started doing that from home. I had like 25 followers at first,” Longest said.

It was one of those 25 followers that serendipitously suggested Longest apply to Food Network’s “Master Chef.” Longest thought getting onto a show like “Master Chef” would be a good way to, at the very least, get her videos out there to a larger audience and gain valuable experience. At best, she could win.

When she didn’t get chosen for the show Longest said, “I was so upset, I was literally just living in the kitchen trying to prove the world wrong.”

She did however receive a call a couple months later to be on a new Food Network show they were developing called “Restaurant Express.” A casting director for “Master Chef” liked her personality and had kept her in mind.

“I didn’t even know what show it was, I just said yes, of course I’ll be in it!” she laughed.

Longest won the competition in 2013, beating competitors with culinary degrees and extensive restaurant experience. Winning meant she had the opportunity to run her own concept kitchen at a restaurant in Las Vegas at the M resort called Jayde Fuzion.

‘I knew Vegas was a mistake’

The opportunity, however, was just not a good fit.

When she won Restaurant Express, she said she had no idea what to think or how to feel. That was because winning, she said, “was a glorious moment to worry about my life. That’s what really happened in my head and my heart.”

Longest’s husband Jacob was unable to move because of his career in the Air Force.

Taking on the position as head chef of a restaurant in Las Vegas meant Longest and her husband would be living apart. Not only that, though Longest said she loves the restaurant industry, she felt she was losing sight of her original concept of developing recipes and sharing them online with her followers.

“When I went to Las Vegas, I knew it was a mistake from the first night, so I decided to leave,” she said.

Longest left Las Vegas after about four months. Shortly thereafter, she and Jacob relocated to Roseville for his job reassignment.

“I was like, you know what? This is a new place, a new start,” Longest said. “I’m really going to focus on YouTube as my serious job.”

She went from making a video or two per month to uploading two videos per week. She shifted the content from being mainly what she wanted to share to giving viewers more of what they want to see from her.

For ideas, she scours Google, Instagram and requests from her viewers, always paying attention to food trends and “what’s hot now.”

Recipes like the newest one she is developing for “fluffy dumplings” are very much based on her own process of trial and error, as well on techniques she picks up from her travels.

Drawing inspiration from Asia

While in Taipei, Taiwan, sampling the street food, Longest observed the technique of steaming, boiling and pan searing dumplings simultaneously by nestling the hand-twisted dough filled with ground pork, ginger, garlic and scallion in a cast iron skillet and surrounding them with water. Then they cooks brought the whole thing to a boil on the stove and used a round wooden top to cover the dumplings and steam them. When the water was reduced to nearly nothing, the dumplings get that satisfyingly crispy bottom from finishing on the cast iron.

In her breezy, light-filled kitchen in midtown, Longest prepared her fluffy dumplings for The Sacramento Bee to sample along with two of her most popular dishes online, her recipe for the best ramen with pork chashu and her easy kimchi fried rice.

Longest’s ramen is based on a pork bone-broth made with neck, rib and shank bones. She chars vegetables like ginger and onion that go into making the broth, similar to techniques used in pho preparation, to lend it a deep, smoky flavor. Because her broth is slightly thicker than normal, she likes to use a thick, curly Japanese flour noodle to compliment it. On top of the broth and noodles, she lays a marinated soft-boiled egg, pork chashu, crunchy bean sprouts and chopped green scallions. She makes her own chili and rich black garlic oils for extra savor and spice.

Longest’s noodle dishes are by far the most widely liked and shared online. Her ramen has garnered nearly 4 million views on YouTube.

According to Longest, this is because people just love noodles.

“#liftingnoodles is a thing, my food is on there, check it out,” Longest laughed.

Longest’s kimchi fried rice is a Korean staple gone mainstream.

“When I saw kimchi and kimchi juice jarred up in Whole Foods, I was like, ‘Wow! It’s really getting big now,” Longest said.

Her version of this dish has marinated beef cubes and kimchi (fermented Napa cabbage with Korean spices), sesame seeds, sesame oil, soy, scallions and a fried egg on top.

“Kimchi fried rice always comes with a fried egg, it’s like a rule,” Longest said.

On the topic of eggs, Longest has a definite preference for River Dog Farms out of Napa, one of the many vendors she frequents at Sacramento’s certified farmer’s market on Sundays.

“A good egg has almost a cheesy texture,” said Longest, “When you have a great ingredient there’s not a lot to do. They take care of themselves.”

Adding her own touch

On our visit, Longest added melted mozzarella to her kimchi fried rice. That’s a bold move, she said, that is quite controversial among Korean cooks as cheese has only started to be used in Korea as a result of Western food influence. Adding cheese takes fried rice to the next level as far as decadence and incorporates more of chewy texture than measurable flavor. In short, it works.

“Because Korean food can be super spicy, cheese is used as a way to calm that down. And it’s good!” Longest said.

Taking adversity in stride and shirking tradition is something Longest has grown more comfortable with as she has developed her brand and learned to tune out negative feedback.

When it comes to negativity online Longest said, “I think you just have to get used to it, like any random sounds out there.” She said she mostly treats negative comments and feedback online like ambient noise, “like a car driving by and then it’s gone.”

But she also has used negative comments to spin things in a positive way, like she did with some rude feedback from internet trolls about her strong Korean accent, for example.

“I received a lot of comments about my pronunciation of ‘Noodles’ as ‘nudders,’” she said. “But that’s just my accent, like, I’m Korean!”

In response she made tongue-in-cheek T-shirts with her logo that say “Nudders,” and they continue to be one of her best-selling merchandise items.

Aiming at a lifestyle

Longest has goals to take her brand beyond food and grow it into a lifestyle touchstone. She has a clean, modern approach to aesthetics in her videos that maintains a level of sophistication while remaining comfortable, easy and approachable.

She said she is always on the lookout for “eye-candy” when it comes to new tools, dishes and utensils for her videos because she knows it adds to the appeal for her viewers.

“I’d like to grow my company into like Williams Sonoma or Anthropology, kind of style, like a lifestyle brand,” Longest said. “I love food, but at the same time food is part of life! I love the brand that sells the dishes, the plates.”

But Longest is careful to add that while props and visuals are fun and important, “It really is about the food, and as long as the food is good, I’m happy.”

Longest said her over-the-top tendencies really come out in the finished dish. She can’t resist a good-looking garnish to polish off presentation, be it a sprinkle of sesame seeds, a green pop of chopped scallions, or a gorgeous fried egg with a bright orange yolk.

Longest said she is happy that Korean culture is becoming more recognizable in mainstream American culture with examples like South Korean film “Parasite” winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, Florence Pugh doing an English Mukbang video for Vogue, and K-pop bands on the Hot 100 Billboard charts.

“My assistant looks like a K-pop star, so that really helps my brand,” Longest laughed, talking about her 19-year-old-nephew and assistant Hanyeol Kim, who moved to Sacramento from Atlanta this year to work for her. “But yeah, I think it definitely opens the door much wider than before, there’s so many new people that were never interested in Korea or Korean food before that come to my website or my YouTube channel because I’m sharing recipes. I’m just kind of caught up in the flow, it’s good.”

Longest said she is aware that while she presents her version of recipes from many cultures, it is important people understand that Asian cultures are distinct from one another. She is clear that there are huge differences within Asian cultures, and though she dabbles in different cuisines for her show she is always coming from a Korean perspective when it comes to teaching people about anything concrete regarding culture.

She’s quick to chalk up her success and large following to support from her family, especially her husband Jacob, 41, who is transitioning into retirement after 21 years of service in the Air Force. With pop-up events in the Sacramento area, work on her videos and more, Longest says she can be a lot to keep up with.

“I’m always doing something,” she said. “He jokes that I can’t just let him sit there and do nothing. But it’s true, I can’t. He helps me a lot.”

This story was originally published March 5, 2020 at 4:00 AM.