TacoCat (kinda) Cooks! #42: Savoury Spicy Chow Mien 🍜

Hey Hive!

We're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some of the food we've been making at home since we've been cooking a lot nowadays! Both because it's cheaper and also healthier to cook for yourself compared to eating out. While I usually stick to the usual recipes I do like to try new ones once in a while and figured I'd share the new ones I've tried once a month so here we go!

Last time I shared about a Gochujang Tofu Rice Bowl recipe I found on Youtube, which actually opened up a rabbit hole for me to find more Gochujang recipes from the same channel called Aaron and Claire. They're a Korean couple living in South Korea and Aaron is a former professional chef so their channel is mostly Korean recipes. I've been following them for a while now and since the last recipe went pretty well, I thought I'd try another one!

Gochujang is a Korean spicy fermented paste made from gochu-garu, glutinous rice, meju powder, yeotgireum, and salt. I've seen it being used very frequently and it's probably the most prevalent Korean condiment. We have them in our supermarkets here so they're not hard to find. It definitely packs a punch of spiciness though, so I'll only recommend it to people who can take spicy things.

Source: thekitchn

Anyway, the recipe in the video called for ground beef which I did not have so I had to take some liberties and substituted some ingredients. We also had some leftover instant noodles that neither of us liked so I just used the noodles from those packets without the seasoning.

These were the ingredients I used:

• 7 cloves garlic
• 2 packets instant noodles
• pork luncheon meat
• white shimeji mushrooms
• shiitake mushrooms
• 2 carrots
• frozen broccoli
• beansprouts
• bok choy/xiao bai cai

For the seasoning paste:

• 2 tbsp Korean chili pepper flakes (gochugaru)
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1/2 tbsp oyster sauce
• 1 tbsp Korean soybean paste (doenjang)
• 2 tbsp Korean chili paste (gochujang)

Step 1: Chop the vegetables and mushrooms. I like a lot of vegetables in the meals I prepare since Sean doesn't eat much veggies outside but these are optional. Feel free to use whatever veggies you prefer.

Step 2: Mince the garlic cloves. I use my mini food processor since it doesn't get it too fine and it's faster.

Step 3: Cut the meat into small pieces. If you're using ground meat like the recipe you don't need to do this.

Step 4: Prepare the seasoning paste.

I'm not sure if it's because the pastes were kept in the fridge but they were not mixing well initially, so I added a tablespoon of warm water to mix it into a proper paste.

Step 5: In a pot of boiling water, add in the vegetables.

Step 6: Once the veggies are boiled to your desired doneness (or about 8 minutes), add in the noodles and boil them until they're cooked as per the instructions.

Once the vegetables and noodles are cooked, drain the pot and set it aside.

Step 7: In a wok or pan, heat some oil and stir fry the meat over medium-high heat.

Step 8: Add garlic and saute for 2 minutes.

Step 9: Add the seasoning paste and reduce the heat to low. Stir the meat with the paste for about 2 minutes.

My seasoning got quite clumpy with the meat here. I guess the recipe is a little different because the ground beef would have more oil and be more wet than my luncheon meat. So I added some more water to make it more fluid.

Step 10: Add in the noodles and vegetables and stir fry until everything is well combined with the sauce.

It didn't turn out as saucy as I thought it would, I guess it does look a little dry in the video as well.

Once everything is well combined, it was time to serve!

Although it looked dry everything was well coated in the sauce and it tasted pretty good! There were plenty of vegetables and it was savoury and spicy, but not too spicy. The mushrooms also added a nice chewy texture to the noodles. It was my first time cooking with these white shimeji mushrooms and I was surprised how well they complemented the noodles.

I think the luncheon meat wasn't a very good match though since it was a little too salty with the gochujang sauce. A less processed meat would definitely be much better, but overall it still tasted good.

This was a pretty simple dry noodle/chow mein recipe that you can make if you want to give Gochujang a try. I just wanted to see what other things I could make with Gochujang since it's a pretty big container of sauce. So far everything has been tasty so I'm looking forward to trying more recipes!

Thanks so much for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!

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Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat (kinda) Cooks! #42: Healthy Spicy Tofu and Broccoli 😋