Yesterday it was black day in Korea and we told you what we do and what we eat. Today we tell you how to prepare this famous Korean dish, which is thought to have been introduced by Chinese merchants in the early twentieth century. It seems that it appeared for the first time in 1905 at the Chinese restaurant in Icheon's Chinatown, which has now become a museum dedicated to the dish.
Let's go back to the recipe, so if you are single and looking for a food that can give you comfort you can recreate it here in Italy too. If, like me, you are not capable of getting your hands dirty, you can buy the instant version proposed by the brand Nongshim that with i Chapagetti he recreated a style similar to the Jajangmyeon.
Ingredients:
- Wheat noodles, udon or ramen
- 1 onion
- 1 courgette
- 2 potatoes
- about ten champignon mushrooms
- ¼ cabbage
- 600g of pork chops
Ingredients for marinating pork:
- 1 tablespoon rice wine, mirin
- ¼ tablespoon ground ginger, salt and pepper
To make the black bean salsa:
- 6 tablespoons Korean black bean paste, Chunjang
- 90g of lard
- 2 tablespoons of brown sugar
- 4 tablespoons of mirin
- 1 cup chicken broth
- 1 cup of water
- 5 tablespoons of potato starch
- 4 tablespoons of water to mix with the starch
- Cucumber and corn to decorate
Preparation:
- First, rinse the pork in cold water and marinate it in rice wine and ginger for a quarter of an hour.
- Dice the courgette, onion and potatoes, and then finely slice the mushrooms and the cabbage into larger pieces.
- In the meantime, heat the pan with the lard. Once melted add the black bean paste and stir for a couple of minutes. Then add the sugar and mix for another couple of minutes. Then remove the mixture and leave only the lard in the pan to which the pork must be added to cook it, stirring constantly to bring it to half cooking. At this point you can add onion, courgette and potatoes and continue to cook them, stirring for five minutes. Then add mushrooms and cabbage and continue to cook for another couple of minutes.
- Once the meat and vegetables are cooked, you can finally add the black bean sauce and stir for a couple of minutes.
- Add the chicken broth, water and rice wine and cook for another ten minutes on a higher heat, covering with a lid. Then add the water with the potato starch and continue mixing to thicken the sauce.
- While the sauce is cooking, you can boil the water to cook the noodles. Once cooked, drain them and rinse under running water. Add the black sauce and you can decorate the dish with Julienne cut cucumbers and corn.
Try cooking them and then show us your creations; given my inability, I fall back on Chapagetti, bought at the Asian market in the center of Rome. If I had known beforehand that it was comfort food, I would have eaten it a long time ago 😀
Fabiana
Photo credit: Depositphotos