Bibim soba; sweet and sour dumplings

SOMETIMES I think it would be easy, in Korea, to never eat vegetables.

Not that that’s something I’d ever like to try – I love my veges.
But there really are so many dishes that are pretty much plain noodles, so if you bypassed the kimchi, you may wake up one morning with scurvy.
Hehe.
Ok, not quite true, but you get what I mean.

This is bibim soba, a Japanese twist on jjol myeon, a Korean dish that I think could be stereotyped as the dish for middle-aged women as it seems like they’re always the ones ordering it.

Maybe it's because they realise you need your daily ya-chae (vegetables) as well as your noodles. Mums really do know best.

Bibim soba is exactly the same as jjol myeon except it’s soba instead of cold wheat noodles.

My eatery friends (aka the owner and lady helpers) got a bit of a laugh when I went through my jjol myeon phase a few months back. They would stick their tongues out and pant, fanning their mouths, as a way of asking me if it was spicy.
Well yes it was, it nearly bloody well singed my tongue off but I wasn’t telling them that. I actually think that scored me quite a few points with them.

This bibim soba packed a punch in the heat department, but was balanced nicely with cool noodles and fresh and crunchy salad vegetables.
It is simply as it appears – a pile of salad vegetables and cold soba noodles; drizzle with cold sweet spicy sauce to taste and mix like a crazy person.

Cold and spicy is quite a combination to adapt to.
The initial flavour is sweet and it’s cold to the mouth, but followed up by quite a burn which is difficult to soothe.

On this little Sunday lunchtime outing to a Japanese-Korean eatery, Wes ordered fried dumplings in a sweet and sour sauce – definitely Japanese influenced, as it never appears at a Korean eatery - and rice triangles on the side.
I think he was quite pleased with his pairing: the dumplings were crisp on the outside but moist on the inside and the sauce was lovely.

My noodles were surprisingly soft and non-rubbery, and easy to cut off with the teeth, which is important when strands galore are hanging from your mouth like some kind of extrusion machine.

Take note of the technique, it’s been refined over 11 months and five days of serious eater-watching. And staring. And quickly looking away. And staring.