Here's another of the dishes I came to love while living in Koreas and is actually the first one I was treated to when invited to dinner in someone's home. Soegogi Japchae is a version of Korean stir fry that's wonderful fairly healthy. A little explanation of the name, using the very little bit of Korean that I understand. Japchae, which you'll also see spelled as Chapchae, are "glass noodles." I suppose you could the ones made from rice but I've always used the noodles made from sweet potatoes. Soegogi is marinated beef. Twaejigogi is marinated pork. Hmmmmm, I don't know what chicken is. The particular variation of Japchae I made this time used beef, hence the name Soegogi Japchae. Do the same thing with pork and you've got Twaejigogi Japchae. I'm not sure, but if its made with just vegetables I think its just called Japchae. See how easy Korean is?
Most of the preparation time for this is spent cutting up the ingredients into small slices. The first thing I did was slice up the beef I was using, some beef sirloin this time, and start it soaking in some marinade. The marinade for 1 lb of beef is 4 tablespoons of soy sauce, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 2 tablespoons of chopped green onion, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 tablespoons of sesame oil, and some black pepper (I used about 1/4 teaspoon). The meat was smooshed around to coat everything and sat aside while I prepared the vegetables.
The veggies w.ere then cut up into thin slices. One of the nice parts with this dish is you can pretty much use whatever vegetables you have handy. This time around I used carrots, zucchini, onions, mushrooms, and pea pods. Note: Pea pods aren't traditionally used but I found some nice fresh ones at the market and decided to use them.
As I was finishing up chopping the vegetables I'd started a pot of water boiling to cook the noodles. If you've never used these noodles before they can be a bit of a puzzle at first. The uncooked noodles are amazingly strong. I'm pretty sure they could be used as a substitute for the steel cables used on suspension bridges or heavy-lift cranes. They're obviously too long to eat but if you try to cut them, uncooked, you'll find that nothing less than a bandsaw can make a successful cut. The instant you put them in a pot of boiling water, however, they soften -- and disappear! The transformation is actually kind of fun as you try to figure out how to fit them into the pot and then they just melt into the water.
The noodles boiled for about 6 minutes and then I drained them and cooled them with cold water. I let them sit in the colander to finish draining as I began stir frying the ingredients in my handy dandy wok.
The first thing in the wok was the beef. Because it is sliced so thin it cooks very quickly and the onions were added right after that. Next the carrots and then the mushrooms were added. Following the carrots I added my zucchini and some extra chopped green onions I had. The last thing added were the pea pods. Each of these ingredients cooked for about 1 minute before adding the next ingredient -- it goes very fast. Once the veggies were done I transferred them to a mixing bowl to wait while I finished preparing the noodles.
To finish preparing the noodles, a little sesame oil, soy sauce, and sugar was added to the wok. I really didn't measure them, probably about a teaspoon of each. Now that the noodles were cooked and cool enough to touch, I used a pair of kitchen scissors to cut the cooked noodles into roughly 8-inch lengths. They're pretty slippery so this isn't a precision step -- it just makes the meal a little easier to eat!
The noodles went into the wok and were stirred around while they heated back up. The soy sauce, sesame oil, and sugar give the noodles a wonderful golden color and adds a nice flavor to it. I find the sugar really is the secret ingredient in this dish. As soon as the noodles are evenly coated and hot, the stir fried vegetables are added and thoroughly mixed in with the noodles. Poof! it was done and ready to eat! Traditionally the dish would be garnished with thinly cut fried egg yolk strips but I passed on that since Elizabeth is allergic to eggs (I figured she'd enjoy it a bit more that way).
Eating this with chopsticks is a fun test of your chopstick skills. You pretty much have to grab a small bundle off noodles and veggies and once in your mouth you bite off the noodles. This is another one of those dishes that probably isn't a good first date meal but it sure is tasty. If you're not a fan of spicy food, this is a great dish since it doesn't have any "heat" added to it by spices. We had radish kimchi (see yesterday's post) as a side dish and that provided a nice spicy contrast. This is a really fun dish to prepare with many variations depending on what combination of meat and veggies you choose to use. Definitely something we'll be having many more times in the future.
Bon Appetit!
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