My son requested that I make this dish, and I am so glad he did! My husband is half Korean and I cook a decent amount of Korean food since it is my kids heritage and it is also just so totally amazingly delicious. I had never had or heard of this dish though, and I asked my husband and he had not either.
I got this recipe from Maangchi’s website, which is great place to look for Korean food recipes. I did a bit of reading on this recipe, since noodles aren’t featured heavily in Korean food and it is quite an old dish, but from my reading it sounds like it became more widespread during a period after the Korean war when rice as scarce and flour was available to make noodles.
I have made hand pulled noodles before and that is WAY harder than it looks, but not the case here. You basically just stretch and tear the dough and I found it really fast and easy to make. This dish has relatively few ingredients but tastes SO good. You can make your own kimchi if you want to (at some point I will do a post on that), which is really fun, but most grocery store chains now carry decent kimchi so you don’t need to. Check my Favorite Items page for my favorite fish sauce to use in this recipe.
Kimchi Sujebi (Korean Kimchi Stew with Hand Torn Noodles)
Ingredients
For the dough:
- 2 cups AP flour
- 1/2 tsp kosher salt
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil
- 3/4 cup water I needed about an extra tbsp
For the stew:
- 8 oz well fermented kimchi we like kimchi so I added almost double this amount
- 2 tbsp kimchi brine I just used what was in my jar
- 8 cups chicken stock or vegetable stock
- 1 onion chopped
- 2 garlic cloves minced
- 1 tbsp toasted sesame oil
- 2 tsp chicken powder see my favorite items
- 1 tbsp fish sauce or more to taste
- 1-2 tbsp gochujang see my favorite items
- salt to taste
- sliced green onions for topping
Instructions
- You can make the dough by hand, or in a stand mixer. I used the stand mixer. Mix the ingredients and knead until smooth. I added a little additional water because the dough was a little dry. You want a fairly sticky dough so that you can stretch it thin when you make the noodles. Make sure to fully knead it until smooth and stretchy. Set aside until you are ready to make the noodles.
- For the soup, combine the chicken stock, chicken powder, fish sauce, kimchi, brine, onion, garlic, sesame oil and gochujang in a large stock pot. Bring to a simmer and cook for around 20 minutes so everything can come together. Taste and add more fish sauce, kimchi, gochujang etc to taste.
- When ready to make the noodles, keep soup at a simmer and put a bowl of water next to the pot to keep the dough from sticking to your hands. Divide the dough into two pieces and wet your hands. Stretch the dough until it is very thin and you can almost see through it at one side of the dough ball, then tear off a section about 2×1 inches and throw into the pot. Maangchi has a good video on how to make these if you google kimchi sujebi.
- Cook the noodles for about 5 minutes in the broth until cooked through then garnish with green onions and serve right away.
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