Jap Chae Korean Noodles

I used to live next to a Korean church on Bloor Street in Toronto. It was on the edge of Korea Town and my 3 years of living and going to school in the area introduced me to the wonders of pork bone soup, 24 hour amazing (and awful) BBQ, steamed walnut red bean dough balls, and decent (and, again, awful) sushi. It wasn't until my last summer in the area that the church started having weekly yard sales. Besides buying a $1 Disney puzzle of Tokyo, I would often stop by to look at the older ladies cooking omelets and some kind of sesame noodle dish. Fortunately, the convenience store down the road also had take-out noodles that looked about the same, so despite our language differences, my timid inquiries of "Jap chae?" were well-received. Unfortunately by then I'd basically stopped eating pork, and that was one word not in my Korean vocabulary. Without knowing what was in the noodles, I avoided, and avoided...until I caved. Of course I caved. The key to avoidance is 'out of sight, out of mind' and when you walk past the yard sale every week it's hard to put that into practice. Crossing a major intersection with my eyes closed didn't seem like the best idea.

So when the fine people at Food & Drink put out a complimentary magazine through the LCBO (Ontario liquor stores), I was pleasantly surprised to find a large selection of really interesting recipes. This was not the Kraft recipe magazine sponsored by Our Compliments that comes in the mail and you should promptly throw out. They had a full section on "Asian fare" that went far beyond adding soy sauce to rice with chicken. The recipes weren't even that dumbed down. Sure they skimped on the hot sauce, but how many free magazines come with a recipe for pickled carrots and daikon? Kim Chi dumplings (mun doo) or beef bulgogi with 16 ingredients. This was not a "go to a Korean grocery store and buy bulgogi sauce" cop-out.

Jap Chae is really simple, and with a good sesame oil, or, with enough of a good sesame oil and brown sugar, it's addictive. Don't like spicy? Don't add a lot of chili paste. My only complaint is that their recipe didn't call for any rice vinegar. I'm not sure if that's traditional, but I thought the noodles needed a little kick. Fortunately I made them with a marinated Japanese mackerel dish that had more than its fair share of acid. It worked out perfectly, even if the combination was less than authentic than the individual recipes.

Ingredients:
200 grams sweet potato or yam noodles (these are supposed to be a bit sweeter than rice noodles, but they follow the same quick-soaking rice noodle concept seen in a lot of Thai dishes. I substituted rice noodle vermicelli and it worked fine)
2 tbsp vegetable oil (not sure why this is vegetable oil and not sesame oil...)
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 onions, thinly sliced
1 cup carrots, cut into matchsticks
1 red pepper, thinly sliced
6 shiitake mushrooms, thinly sliced, stems removed (I didn't have any. Obviously it's better with, but it's a stir-dry so it's not the end of the world to leave things out or substitute, as long as you know that the end result will not be the same, and you're not drastically changing the recipe and expecting the best results. Don't get angry at the recipe when it's not a great meal)
1 bunch (4 cups) fresh spinach, stems removed (I used a container of organic baby spinach. Wasteful packaging, but all that was available)

Sauce:
3 tbsp soy sauce (or tamari)
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp Korean red pepper paste, or 1/2 tsp Asian chili sauce (I used 1/2 tsp of my Guizhou Chili Paste. Not Korean, no, but incendiary)
1 tbsp sesame oil (toasted would be a stronger flavour, I think)

2 tbsp cilantro, chopped
1 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted (I left them out, but they do add a lot to the dish)

Every recipe says to cook yam noodles and rice rice noodles a different way. This one worked well, and I think I'll keep it as my standard. Add the noodles to boiling water and boil 5 minutes. Drain and refresh with cold water. Drain again. Simple. I didn't end up with chewy noodles.

The sugar, chili paste, soy sauce and sesame oil got combined in a small bowl to wait while the vegetable oil got heated in a large frying pan.
Now the stir-frying fun. The garlic got added to the hot oil. 30 seconds later the onion and carrot went in. 1 minute later the red pepper and mushrooms. 2 minutes later the drained noodles and the spinach. 1 minute later the combined sauce from the small bowl. 2 minutes later it was poured into a large platter, topped with cilantro and sesame seeds (not mine, but yours can be) and devoured (both mine and yours). So quick. The nice thing is that if you don't like the final seasonings, you can adjust them. More soy or chile paste. Or serve with a vinegar. Chinese would go with black vinegar probably, but for Korean I wouldn't know what to do. I just knew it needed something. Without it it's just a simple, sweet dish. Some people like that, I hear.

Un-Flung Heroes...

Well, I tried. the whole concept of flung noodles is to stretch one long piece of dough into an arm's length noodle, then hold the two ends in one hand and the middle of the noodle length in the other and re-fling. When it gets to arm's length again, double the ends and stretch from the middle. Repeat. Repeat. Etc. After doing this a bunch of times one noodle length becomes one very, very long folded-over noodle (1 fold = 2 noodle strands, 2 folds = 4 noodle strands, 3 folds = 8 noodles, 7 folds = 128 noodles). At the end you toss this whole elongated noodle into hot broth and cook it. Serve with scissors. Here's what actually happened:

I stretched the dough out a little. So far so good. Then some tentative flings:

Intense concentration as it got longer:

The dough didn't want to stretch evenly and after folding it over I tried to figure out a way to not fling from the end.

There's a reason there are no more pictures...I started laughing when the noodle started breaking. It hit me in the face a few times...and broke a lot. Then I'd fling the broken pieces. I never really got past two folds with either piece of dough.

After about 15 minutes of flinging, dough flying everywhere but where I wanted it to be, stretching it, milking it like a cow without the pay-off, I decided it would be a better idea to roll the pieces out thin and slice them with a knife. They were beautiful. Not one long noodle, but it all worked out just fine.


Most importantly, I got to heat up the leftover deer broth, eat leftover jiaozi with chile sauce and soy sauce, then toss the fresh noodles into the thick, grease broth of the deer. After eating the noodles with the chile, soy and hoisin, my roommate and I slurped up the thick, opaque broth. Deer is a very fatty meat apparently, or at least ground deer is very fatty. When I explained the broth to my roommate the conversation went like this:

Me: "When I made the broth with deer, all the fat solidified on top when it cooled, and scraping it off was so easy! I couldn't believe it."

Roommate: "Wait, did you say deer or beer?"

Me: "Deer."

He then explained that normally he would have assumed I said beer. Didn't say anything about how ridiculous I am. Very polite.

The broth was absolutely amazing. So much flavour from the cardamom, the cloves and the deer. It almost tasted bitter from the meat, but it was the perfect contrast from the heat of the hot chile paste and sweet hoisin. Brilliant Chinese idea to cook everything in one pot - make the broth, steam or boil the dumplings, cook the noodles in the meat-infused broth, drink the broth that has soaked up all of these flavours to end the meal.

Noodles: the un-sung heroes of the kitchen - a simple combination of flour, egg, salt and water. No matter how bad a flinger I am, even I couldn't destroy a beautifully simple meal.

I feel like I should have mopped the kitchen floor...

Today I'm going to fling noodles. Odds are it's going to be a disaster. That's why I made two balls of dough. One has a bit more water-egg combination, and the other is a bit dryer. One I kneaded by hand, one I did in my pasta maker. They are currently sitting on my kitchen counter, waiting. Probably they see my kitchen floor out of the corner of their eyes (it is not gnocchi, it is not potato, they do not have eyes, I remind myself) and think that it's an awfully long way down.

There is actually no recipe for this. In "Beyond the Great Wall", the authors state that try as they might, they have never successfully re-created "Flung Noodles", like they've seen flung by Uighurs (pronounced "Way-gurs") in China. There is, however, a picture of someone successfully doing it, and a description of how, in theory, it should be done. I am using a Kazach stretched noodle recipe, like the book says may work. I'm using Première Moisson flour and I have hope that this may help, simply because it's a very good bread flour. Première Moisson dough makes incredible loaves of perfect bread. Lets ignore the yeast for a second. Suspend belief. Already my chances seem better, my hopes are lifted, and I feel okay about still not having mopped the floor. If those noodles go down, they're staying down. There will be no 5 second rule.

20 minutes left to wait...