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Eric and I were first introduced to Duk Bok Gi by a Korean friend in Pittsburgh. The dish is made with thick rice noodles and a chilli sauce. It is apparently considered more of a street vendor type of food in Korea, meant to be eaten on a cold day. A local Pittsburgh restaurant offered it on the menu and we became hooked after Ye Jeong first ordered it for us. Later, she made it for us at home and it became one of our favorite Korean dishes, even though we struggled to remember what it was called.

After moving to Sydney, we discovered a mecca of good Korean restaurants. (At least, we think they are good. If you ask a Korean, they will sniff and tell you that it tastes better at home.) But we found that only a couple of the restaurants serve Duk Bok Gi. It seems that its street food reputation makes it too pedestrian for some of the restaurants. Requests for it will be met with a polite look of disdain. So we are happy to order it when we can.

Duk Bok Gi is a very simple dish. The thick noodles, also called rice sticks, have a wonderful dense, chewy texture that makes the dish so satisfying. The chilli sauce is a deep red color with a slight sweet smokiness and plenty of heat. This comes from the Korean chilli paste, go chu zang. It has a similarity in flavor to good hot hungarian paprika. To this is added vegetables like red and green pepper, broccoli, carrots, cabbage and onion. Also strips of fish cake, which have a rubbery, scrambled egg texture. Sometimes it also has some fresh seafood mixed in, like squid, which makes a great complement.

I always keep my eyes open in the asian markets for the noodles and chilli, but never seem to see it mixed in among other chinese, japanese, vietnamese and thai ingredients that are more familiar. Last week Eric and I took a new route home and we passed a shop that was clearly a Korean market. It was tiny, with tons of merchandise and impossibly narrow aisles. We spotted the rice sticks and figured out, by process of elimination, which package had chilli paste inside. The only clue was the image of a red chilli pepper on the front.

So I attempted the dish at home a couple nights later using a couple of recipes I found on the internet and improvising a little. The packet of noodles (I believe this is the duk part) was vacuum packed and a rock-hard mass. I heated the noodles in boiling water until they came unstuck and heated through, though I probably didn’t take them out soon enough, as they got a bit soft on the outside. One of the recipes called for sauteeing the noodles in a frying pan with oil. Maybe I’ll try that instead next time, if I can figure out how to get them separated first.

Ingredients for the meal

In a separate pan I sauteed some pork loin. This was my improvisation, simply because we didn’t find the fish cake and I wasn’t going through the rigamarole of finding fresh squid (and figuring out how to cook that properly as well!) and I was planning the dish being a one-pot dinner. (Korean readers are probably shuddering in horror.) To this I added the sauce mixture: 2 tablespoons of the go chu zang chilli paste. Although this didn’t look like much, it was more than enough heat for half a pound of noodles, as I later discovered. I added a couple teaspoons each of soy sauce and sugar (and later added a little more sugar, to help tone down the heat a bit) and a dash of sesame oil. I completely forgot to add the sesame seeds and garlic that the recipe also called for (I guess I was overwhelmed by the newness of it all).

Cooking in the Pork with the Chilli Paste and Rice Noodles

That’s where the recipes left me hanging. In the restaurants, the sauce is always a thin liquid, and what I had in the pan was a thick paste. There was no indication for any kind of broth, so I just gradually added some of the water left over after I drained the boiling noodles. This got me the right amount of liquid, but I think the starch in the water thickened the sauce too much and gave it kind of a glazed consistency.

Adding in the Red and Green Peppers

I then tossed in cubes of red and green pepper and spring onion. When these were heated through and just becoming cooked, I turned off the heat and spooned the mixture into bowls. Verdict: it was pretty good! Not outstanding, but certainly an edible and even satisfying meal. I think I’ll make some refinements next time, like not forgetting the garlic and sesame seeds and thinning the sauce with plain water or broth. That might get it a little closer to being “authentic”. And maybe someday Eric and I will wander the streets of Seoul on a cold day and get of taste of what it’s really supposed to be.

Spicy Duk Bok Gi ready to serve