Why Hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we’re…this cue card says “slurping up some science”, which I refuse to say for what I think are obvious reasons. I’m your Objecting Orator, Jon O’Gion, and I somehow misspelled my own name. Maybe I shouldn’t have started this post at 3 AM. But then again, if I could just make better mental decisions, I wouldn’t be in therapy, now would I? Would I? Seriously, is that the line? Let’s move on before I get stuck on this schtick. Today we’re making Japchae, as the ‘last’ of our Seoul Food series, which was never officially a series, we just kind of made a bunch of Korean food in September and October. IF you want to avoid…probably more of this, then click this link to slink off to the RECIPES, like a COWARD, while the rest of us bravely plunge into madness. Let’s Dig In.

Send Noods

I honestly don’t know if I’ve made that joke before, and I don’t have the energy to check. So, today’s recipe is Japchae, a name that looks and sounds vaguely like a slur, but I assure you, is just LIES. Specifically, japchae means “mixed vegetables”, a weird name for a NOODLE dish.

I mean, yes, I can see the vegetables, but they’re AROUND the noodles.

This is because japchae was actually created before its PRIMARY INGREDIENT was introduced to Korea. Back in the long-long ago, Yi Chung, who I’m sure is a real person and not at all a League of Legends champion, made the first japchae, a mixture of stir-fried vegetables and mushrooms, and served it to the king.  The king loved it so much he gave the guy an official court position, so the dude could keep making it for him.

It wasn’t until they gave it the COMMONERS, and dangmyeon came into vogue, that the noodles, now a defining features of japchae, met the dish. Which means now we’ve got to talk about THEM. Dangmyeon, or “Tang Noodles”, after the Tang dynasty of China, refer to a class of cellophane noodles: basically, there are a bunch of plants where, if you grind the starch out of them, they’ll make noodles…but they’ll be clear. Different places rely on different plants, with both Japan and Korea opting for sweet-potato starch as the backbone of their versions, which they developed after being introduced to the noodles by China.

As an American, I have decades of conditioning that the phrase “Beijing welcomes you” is an inherently worrying one.

This is great news for me, because it means I’ve finally found a foreign equivalent to the English “mincemeat” (while early recipes included venison, modern mincemeat is typically just nuts and fruits, MAYBE with some animal fat, but those are mostly being phased out.) A dish whose name USED to be right, but isn’t anymore.  Anywho, modern japchae is predominantly a mixture of cellophane noodles, stir-fried with vegetables, and meat. There’s a BUNCH of variations to it, though there are a couple “stand-by” ingredients: Spinach is very popular as an ingredient, as are mushrooms, carrots and/or onions , scallions…Beef is the slightly-preferred meat option, but not by a lot.

And…that’s it? Do I have anything more I want to say? I…don’t…think…so. Like, I have talked a LOT about Korean food and culture and history, so I don’t really want to retread that here, the dish is fairly straightforward in history and name… Eh, maybe we do a short one today. Or maybe we’ll find something while cooking worth talking about more. So…let’s get started.

Prep, Chop, Jay

 Oh, I guess I could touch on that: japchae is pronounced jahp-chay. The first syllable rhymes with chop/hop, not wrap/rap. It also has that Korean (well, Asian in general) issue of transliteration: you might find it written as “chap-chae”, japjae, chapjae, etc. This is always a struggle: I was actually just reading a news article from 1978 about people being confused by the shift to the Pinyin transliteration system for Chinese, which was supposed to help Westerners get closer to the correct sounds. Which is how chi became qi, that most hated of Scrabble words, and how Peking became Beijing. (fun fact about that: it was SUPPOSED to be “pay-king”, since the word in Chinese is actually closer to “pey-ching” in sounds than the other two, (at least by some pronunciations, but people just said “pee-king” for so long that it became the accepted one.)  

I was going to mock the idea of calling this dish “Beijing Duck”, but honestly, you could make that work. “Peking” is the traditional version, “Beijing” is like, a newer one.

Anywho, this dish is a stir-fry, which means it is MOSTLY mise-en-place: once you’ve pre-cut all the veggies, and pre-cooked the noodles, you’ve just got however much you want to stir-fry left to do. With a good stove, you can be done in like, 8 minutes.  Technically, a more authentic/traditional style would be…the same idea but more exhausting, as you’d cook each component separately, moving to separate platters as they finish, and then toss them together when they’re all done. Kind of like how we made the various veggies for Bibimbap. This version, however, is a quick and easy one, adapted from a couple sources, but built on the back-bone of (site royalty for the last month) Aaron and Claire’s 15 minute Japchae recipe.

The most obvious thing I did was upgrade the size: Aaron and Claire’s recipe is for 2-3 servings, and my family are not delicate eaters. Since this was going to be the entire meal, we needed to double all the ingredients, to make a batch with 4-6 servings, which did not survive the meal. We stuck to their vegetable lay-out of Shiitake Mushrooms, carrot, onion, bell peppers, and nira, garlic chives.

See here, looking like neither chives nor garlic.

This is actually a relatively big departure from traditional recipes, which Aaron talks about in his video.  Spinach is the far-preferred green veggie for japchae, which is why I mentioned it as a ‘standard’. However, Aaron uses nira for a specific reason: reheating. Reheated spinach can supposedly become mildly toxic/carcinogenic as the iron in it oxidizes, and the nitrates in it concentrate and it typically doesn’t hold its structure very well. So if you’re intending to have left-over noodles, you don’t want to have Spinach in the dish. Garlic chives (or, if you don’t have an Asian market nearby, normal chives or green onion) hold up better, and don’t have the same risk. If you don’t intend to leave left-overs, you can wilt down some spinach in the mixture instead.

Once you have all your veggies prepped, you need to get your noodles ready. Aaron’s instructions are to cook them like you (should) a potato: start them in cold water, and bring them up to temp. He also suggests you add a small amount of dark soy sauce to the cooking water, in order to “stain” the noodles: it’s semi-traditional to slightly brown/darken the clear noodles for the dish, either by seasoning the water like here, or by tossing the noodles in soy-sauce after cooking, letting them soak in the sauce before frying them in a richer soy-based sauce.

It doesn’t LOOK like these are all that colored by the soy sauce, but I also have no bar against which to measure that feeling.

Once boiled and cooled, the noodles are cut the Korean way: just go at the bowl with some kitchen shears, cutting enough that the strands (which are like, 18 inches long) are trimmed down to something you can twirl on a fork/slurp up more feasibly. Dress them with some sesame oil and toss to reduce clumping, burning your hands because you decided to start while they were too hot.

My next change was…complicated, and I think slightly incorrect. I used ground pork instead of the normal strips of meat you get. Now, I had a reason for this, but it didn’t pan out. My initial idea was to use half the ground pork for this recipe, and then half to re-make the soondubu paste that we tragically left out overnight. However, when I then doubled the recipe, that meant this recipe now called for a whole pound of pork. And slight spoilers for the end, but my major complaint with the dish we made is that it is a little greasy. Not even, I think, in the eating experience: it didn’t TASTE greasy, but I finished my bowl, and the bottom was fully coated in a thin layer of fat. And I think that was partly because there’s more fat mixed into the ground pork than in the trimmed strips of pork like were recommended. I think you can still get away with using it, you’ll just want to pour off like, a tablespoon or two of fat after frying the pork, and before adding the other ingredients.

I then made my own version of the sauce, based on some other recipes we had access to in the house: Aaron’s sauce is a simple mixture of sugar, soy sauce, oyster sauce, and if you have some, MSG. I couldn’t find our MSG, but I did mix in 3 cracks of freshly ground black pepper, and ¼ tsp grated ginger, using our new ginger rasp we picked up a month or two ago.

Rise and Grind, boys and girls. Get those little teeth digging into your rhizomes.

I think this added a little lift to the sauce, by adding a little pungency to it.  I took the idea from “The Korean Table”, where they make a BIG batch of “Sweet Soy Base”, consisting of soy, garlic, ginger, pepper, brown sugar, and wine, reduced  into a sauce that you can use as a, well, BASE, for the sauces in a variety of Korean dishes, adding additional flavors depending on the dish. But I didn’t want to make 2 quarts of sauce and then have to find a place to store it so I could use 5 tablespoons of it today, so I instead opted for a small amount of ginger and pepper in the simplified sauce, to add some nuance.

The pepper looks like a lot more than it is. This looks like the evil goo from which a deadly threat emerges.

Once the noodles are cool, the veggies cut, and the sauce made, it’s finally time to actually cook this. Over high-heat, fry the pork in a couple tablespoons of vegetable oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, until no visible pink is on the outside, and, preferably, there’s SOME browning. I specifically tried to avoid breaking up the pork too much below say, a half-dollar sized chunk, or 1 inch strand, I order to replicate the ‘strips’ of pork in the original.

To the skillet, you then add sliced onion, minced garlic, match-sticked carrots, and bell pepper. Aaron recommends using red and yellow bell pepper, and I feel like I agree, for a simple reason: presentation. You’re getting orange from the carrots, you’re about to have a lot of green from the nira/chives, so do you want to double down on green with green bell pepper? Instead, use the red and yellow, since they complement the carrot.

Hey, you want some fall colors? Doesn’t this look like a beautiful fall tree?

After 3-5 minutes (basically, you just want to slightly soften the carrot and bell pepper), add the sliced mushrooms, chives, and sauce. Now, normally, I’d have added the mushrooms earlier, since I enjoy well-browned mushrooms, but Aaron argues that mushrooms are oil-hungry FIENDS, so if you tossed them in earlier, they’d have absorbed all the fat, leaving you nothing to fry the other veggies in. Which might mean that, given the slight excess of oil, I SHOULD have added them sooner, but on the other hand, keeping them relatively pale also adds to the presentation of the dish.

After maybe a minute of stirring all those together, you want to lower the heat to low, add in the noodles, and start…”dragging” them together. This is going to be a weird set of movements, being one part folding, one part stirring, and one part shaking, as you try and shake apart clumps of noodles like a dog with a chew toy, and work the vegetables and meat semi-evenly through the newly disparate strands. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where you’re happy with the results. Scoop into a bowl, and sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds, and you’ve done it!

I chose a blue bowl to complete the wide range of colors involved in the dish.

The results are an unequivocal success: EVERYONE in the household had a second bowl, everyone liked it, Nate even asked if it was on par with the quality mom got from the restaurant. Like I said, my ONE complaint is that, finishing my bowl and seeing the oil coating made me wonder “shit, was there really that much oil in this?” and consider how to rein that in, but you didn’t really taste it.  So yeah, I definitely recommend trying it yourselves. It’s pretty simple and quick...ish. (Due to O’Guin time dilation, the recipe took about an hour for us, despite it being a “15 minute recipe”. Cutting all the veg, our slow stove-top brining the water to a boil, discovering partway through cooking that the gate to our backyard was wide-open and thus the chickens may have wandered off into the street, it was a confusing time.) Still, once you get your hands on a couple slightly strange ingredients, it’s a cool recipe for getting into stir-fry, so I hope you give it a try. BOOM, that’s a rhyme, baybeeeeeee. Wrap it up.

THURSDAY: I DUNNO. I JUST FOUND A SERIES DISCUSSING THE HISTORY OF PORK CONSUMPTION IN KOREA, AND IT’S LIKE, ONE AND A HALF HOURS LONG, SO THAT MIGHT WORK.

MONDAY: PROBABLY NOODLES AGAIN, OR…SHIT, THAT’S OUT PRE-HALLOWEEN POST. I HAD AN IDEA FOR THAT, SO MAYBE WE’LL DO THAT INSTEAD.

Recipe

Quick and Simple Japchae

Serves 4-6

Ingredients
(NOTE: the original recipe was in grams, so I’m keeping that, and converting roughly for America. Don’t get too bogged down by it, though: the original recipe wasn’t super-rigorous, and neither were we: I’m pretty sure we had twice as much bell pepper as the recipe suggests, because I let my mother cut that, and she insisted multiple times that she “doesn’t cook that way” while I was measuring out the other ingredients.)

Noodles

240 g (around half a pound) potato-starch cellophane noodles

1 tbsp dark soy sauce (optional)

1.5 tbsp sesame oil

Sauce

3 tbsp sugar

3 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp oyster sauce

1 tsp MSG (optional)

¼ tsp grated ginger

A pinch of freshly cracked black pepper

Stir-Fry

3 tbsp vegetable oil

500 g (around 1.25 pounds) meat of your choosing, preferably somewhat lean

Salt and pepper to taste

100 g (a little under ¼ pound) onion, sliced

2 tbsp minced garlic

100 g carrot, cut into matchsticks

100 g bell pepper, sliced

100 g nira/green onions/chives/spinach

100 g shiitake mushrooms with stems removed, sliced

Toasted Sesame Seeds, for topping

Preparation

1. Prepare the noodles: place into 6 cups of water, adding the dark soy sauce, if using, and bring to a boil. Boil 6 minutes, then drain. Cut into manageable pieces, and toss with sesame oil to prevent clumping as you prepare the rest of it.

2. Combine all the sauce ingredients in a small bowl.

3. Heat the vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the meat, season, and cook until the outside is completely seared/visibly ‘cooked’. Add the onion, garlic, bell pepper, and carrot. Fry an additional 3-5 minutes, until vegetables are slightly softened.  Add nira, mushrooms, and sauce. Cook an additional minute or so, stirring to coat ingredients.

4. Reduce heat to low, and add cooked noodles. Stir, fold, and combine noodles, sauce, vegetables and meat. Scoop into plates or bowls for service, and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Serve.