In this paper, we present a speech recognition system using a throat microphone. The use of this kind of microphone minimizes the impact of environmental noise. Due to the absence of high frequencies and the partial loss of formant frequencies, previous systems using throat microphones have shown a lower recognition rate than systems which use standard microphones. To develop a high performance automatic speech recognition (ASR) system using only a throat microphone, we propose two methods. First, based on Korean phonological feature theory and a detailed throat signal analysis, we show that it is possible to develop an ASR system using only a throat microphone, and propose conditions of the feature extraction algorithm. Second, we optimize the zero-crossing with peak amplitude (ZCPA) algorithm to guarantee the high performance of the ASR system using only a throat microphone. For ZCPA optimization, we propose an intensification of the formant frequencies and a selection of cochlear filters. Experimental results show that this system yields a performance improvement of about 4% and a reduction in time complexity of 25% when compared to the performance of a standard ZCPA algorithm on throat microphone signals.