Jjajang Myun (짜장면) - Noodles in Black Bean Sauce

Jjajang myun consists of a thick black bean sauce served over chewy noodles; usually served with pickled radish , raw onions dressed with vinegar with a side of black bean paste. Black bean paste, chopped veggies (usually just as simple as onions & green squash) & ground meat (traditionally either beef or pork) are sauteed together then some stock is added to cut down the saltiness and some starch is added to thicken the sauce. The dish is finished with some julienned cucumbers. There are some variations on the sauce: omit the starch, instead of ground meat then chopped seafood. Basically it's a bowl of YUM.

In Korea it's a simple street food. You can have it delivered to your door like we in America have pizza delivery... It's not delivered in ugly styrofoam containers either - restaurants take the time to portion out each serving into the bowls they use at the tables & pack it into insulated stainless steel vertical hotboxes. The delivery person then secures the hotbox onto the back of a moped and in minutes you have jjajang myun at your door. What do you do with the dishes after you're done your meal? Well, you leave them outside by your door & the delivery person comes by to collect them.

As a child jjajang myun was one of my favorite foods - fun to eat, not unrecognizable nor complicated looking, not bland but not spicy... Much like getting a milk mustache, a badge of honor was getting a jjajang myun mustache & beard. One of the few times my mom would let us be messy with our food - one MUST slurp the noodles when eating jjajang myun or the experience is not complete. In Asian cultures you show your appreciation of the food/cook/host by eating noisily.

Anyhow, I used to get together with a couple girlfriends every couple of months for a cooking club of sorts... We would literally spend days bouncing emails back and forth brainstorming on food ideas. We take a traditional dish & try to lighten it. One day we settled on Jjajang myun. So I call this our modern Jjajang myun. We used a mixed of frozen chopped veggies & instead of ground beef/pork we used ground turkey. You can find the jjajang base at any Korean market.

So I came home from cooking club and I mentioned that we made jjajang myun so the craving set in my mom's mind... A few weeks later on a lazy Saturday I decided to make jjajang myun for dinner.

The food prep - diced onions & potatoes, dried noodles, mixed veggies, sliced steak (I used what we had at home) and the jjajang paste.

Ready for the sauce to get happy.

Bowl of jjajang myun piping hot ready to be eaten!

My dad

My mom

Mind you, it was a lazy Saturday at home so we were dressed in casual louge clothes - my mother would probably be mortified that I posted this picture... So shhh!