How long can I keep an open bag/container of deunjeung jjigae paste?

indefinitely or until you get white fuzzy stuff on it, or a weird rotten smell, whichever comes first. but seriuosly… last month i discovered an open box with doenjang which must have been there for a looong time. I mean at least a year. No fuzzy stuff, no weird smell, no rotten taste so i used it to cook soup and it worked fine. about jjajjang I’m not sure, but since it is all fermenting i.e. controlled rotting, just have a sniff before you eat it, which is, since I am a bachelor, something i only can recommend…

^ It’s good if white mold is on there. Traditionally, when the bean paste was stored in clay pots, people looked for white mold – it means it fermented well. If white mold grows on top, just scrape it off with a spoon and u can eat what is below it. :)

I don’t know if white mold signifies good things or not, but I can tell you that my mom just scraped it off and dug into the paste beneath. I keep all my pastes in the fridge, but when we lived in Korean, mom had huge clay jars on the roof of a little concrete shed and they were filled with beanpaste and soy sauce. It stayed pretty hot during the summer (I remember the lids to the pots being very warm to the touch), but it lasted for ages. Just scrape and dip, scrape and dip.