Golbaengi-muchim (Spicy Whelk Salad with Somyeon)

Variations

• Fresh whelks: boil live whelks 5 minutes in salted water and pick them out of the shells. Much firmer and cleaner-tasting than canned, but the guts have to be dealt with properly and the water is harder to manage.
• With squid or conch: blanched squid or conch mixed half and half stretches it and varies the texture. Cool it completely and drain it before it goes in.
• With water dropwort: blanched minari instead of cucumber, common in spring, and the aroma comes much further forward.
• Cabbage base: finely shredded cabbage, salted, when there is no cucumber. It gives up less water than cucumber and is easier to handle.
• Milder: drop the gochujang to 1 tbsp and raise the gochugaru to 3 tbsp — the colour holds and only the heat comes down. Leaving the gochujang and just adding sugar makes it cloying rather than milder.
• Other noodles: jjolmyeon or medium wheat noodles work, but thicker noodles drink more dressing, so put a little extra on them.

Tips

• Water is the whole dish. Once liquid out of the whelks, cucumber and onion has thinned the dressing, adding more gochujang does not bring it back. Salt and squeeze the cucumber, drain the whelks completely, and toss at the last moment.
• Salting the cucumber is osmosis done in advance. You are making the salt pull water out of the cells in a bowl rather than on the plate (salt and seasoning). It is the same phenomenon that makes poke get dressed at the last second, handled the opposite way round: poke avoids the time, this dish spends it up front.
• Vinegar goes in last. Gochugaru that soaks up vinegar swells, which dulls the colour and wrecks the body of the dressing. Build the thick paste first and finish with the vinegar.
• Finish the seasoning at the dressing stage. Aim for heat, then sourness, then sweetness holding both. After tossing, water keeps coming out and it keeps thinning, so adding gochujang then is damage control (balancing flavour).
• Noodles on the side. Mixed in, somyeon absorbs all the dressing: the salad loses its sauce and the noodles go slack. Restaurants putting the noodles beside it are not being generous, they are being structural.
• Rinse the somyeon three times in cold water to wash the surface starch off, or it sticks and sags (cooking noodles). Same handling as bibim-guksu, and the same gochujang-and-vinegar family of dressing — the difference is that there the noodles are the point and get mixed, here they are the companion and stay separate.
• Perilla last, two or three folds. Earlier and it wilts and the scent goes. Same reason kongnamul-muchim takes its sesame oil at the end: whatever carries the aroma goes in last.
• Toss with your hands. Easier to control than tongs, and since the aim is not to rub hard, hands win.
• Leftovers make their own liquid. If you know you will keep some, dress only half and hold the rest of the sauce back. If it has already gone watery, pour the liquid off and stir a little more dressing through.
• The canned version is the original. There is no need to read this dish as a compromise: it settled into its current form as drinking food after canned whelks became widely available, and the old bars use cans too. It is one of the rare cases where that can be said plainly — here the can is not a substitute, it is the ingredient.