Jjajangmyeon (Black Bean Noodles)

Variations

• Gan-jjajang: Stir-fried thick without water/starch and served with the noodles on the side.
• Samseon jjajang: Upgraded with seafood — shrimp, squid, sea cucumber.
• Yuni-jjajang: Finely minced meat and vegetables for a smooth sauce.
• Jjajang-bap: Spooned over rice instead of noodles.

Tips

• Frying the chunjang is not the same move as blooming a paste, and what changes it is how much oil is in the pan. Fermented pastes has a section on this exact step — it calls frying the black bean paste "half of making jjajangmyeon" — and gives the window as "low heat, thirty seconds to a minute", with the doubanjiang in mapo tofu as the companion case. This recipe fries for two to three minutes and is not disobeying it. A spoonful of doubanjiang is smeared over hot metal, so it reaches the pan's temperature at once; chunjang goes into a pool of oil deep enough to suspend it, touching nothing, so it cannot get hotter than the oil and a low flame under that much oil moves slowly. The guide's own warning is that over high heat "that window does not exist" — the oil is what buys the window back.
• It is also why the paste goes into the pot oil and all. Blooming spices is about moving aroma into fat, and by the time the chunjang is fried the fat is carrying what came out of it. Pouring the paste in and leaving the oil behind throws that away.
• The sauce is thickened before it ever meets a noodle, and that decides the rest of the recipe. Thickening a sauce puts the gloss here in the same family as the glassy potato starch of tangsuyuk, and warns that a starch sauce is loosened by acid and by over-stirring — which is why the slurry goes in at the end, in stages, into a sauce that is not going to be stirred hard again.
• Which is what makes the rinse possible, against the rule this dish looks like it belongs to. Cooking noodles treats rinsing as a question of purpose — do not rinse when the sauce has to cling, because surface starch is the glue — and that is where this dish looks like it belongs. It rinses and then reheats anyway, and the guide sets it aside from that bullet for the reason that follows. Bibim-guksu has the resolution for a dish caught on both sides of that rule: when the sauce carries its own body, the noodle no longer has to supply the glue. Here the starch is already in the sauce, so rinsing costs nothing and buys the other thing cold water does — it stops the cooking dead, which is what keeps the strand chewy under something hot poured over it. Dan dan noodles files this dish and bibim-guksu together as "sauce and noodles kept apart and combined at the last moment."
• Frying the chunjang in oil first is the most important step — raw chunjang is bitter and harsh.
• Cook the onions plentifully and thoroughly for the sweetness that anchors the flavor.
• Add the starch slurry in stages to control thickness — all at once clumps.
• Boil the noodles, rinse in cold water, then reheat for a chewier bite.
• A spoon of sugar tames the chunjang's bitterness and brings out umami.