Jjamppong

A red seafood noodle soup whose vegetables are charred in a dry screaming-hot wok before any liquid.

Chicken, Pork, Fish, Shellfish. Not vegetarian — contains chicken, fish, pork, shellfish.

Ingredients

• 200 g squid, scored and cut in pieces
• 250 g mussels and clams, cleaned
• 8 raw prawns
• 100 g pork belly, in strips
• half a cabbage, in thick strips
• 1 onion, in wedges
• 1 carrot, sliced thin
• 4 dried wood ear mushrooms, soaked
• 4 spring onions, in 5 cm lengths
• 3 tablespoons gochugaru
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 4 cloves garlic, sliced
• 1 piece ginger, 2 cm, shredded
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 700 ml chicken or anchovy and kelp stock, as on its own page
• 400 g fresh thick wheat noodles

Method

1. THE VEGETABLES ARE CHARRED IN A DRY SCREAMING-HOT WOK FIRST. Cabbage, onion and carrot thrown into a wok hot enough to smoke, with almost no oil, and left to catch before being tossed -- forty seconds, until the edges are blackened in places. That scorching is the flavour this soup is built on and it cannot be got any other way: softened gently in oil, the vegetables are sweet and the broth tastes flat however much chilli goes in.
2. SO THE WOK MUST BE EMPTY AND DRY AND LEFT TO GET GENUINELY HOT, two or three minutes until it smokes. Oil added at that point burns, which is why there is almost none to start with and it goes in with the aromatics afterwards.
3. THE SEAFOOD GOES IN FOR THE LAST TWO MINUTES. Squid turns to rubber in three and prawns in four, and mussels open and then shrink. Everything else is finished before any of it goes near the pot.
4. THE CHILLI IS BLOOMED IN THE OIL, not stirred into the broth, as elsewhere in this collection -- thirty seconds after the aromatics and before the liquid.
5. AND THE NOODLES ARE COOKED SEPARATELY AND PUT IN THE BOWL. Cooked in the broth they shed starch and thicken it, which is right for the kalguksu on this site and wrong here: jjamppong's broth should be thin, fierce and clear enough to see the chilli in.
6. Noodles boiled separately until just tender, drained, rinsed briefly, and divided between two deep bowls.
7. A wok heated EMPTY and DRY over the highest heat 2 to 3 minutes, until it smokes.
8. The cabbage, onion and carrot thrown in and left 20 seconds without moving, then tossed, 40 SECONDS in all, until charred at the edges. Tipped out.
9. The oil in, then the pork, garlic and ginger, 2 minutes.
10. The gochugaru added and fried 30 SECONDS until deep red.
11. The soy sauce, then the stock, poured in. Brought to a hard boil.
12. The charred vegetables and the wood ear returned, and boiled 3 minutes.
13. THE SEAFOOD ADDED and cooked 2 MINUTES, until the mussels open and the squid has just turned opaque.
14. The spring onions thrown in and the pot taken off the heat. Any unopened shells discarded.
15. Ladled over the noodles at once, seafood arranged on top.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under South Korea · All recipes