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

It’s not easy to find everything you need, as some of the ingredients simply aren’t available. For example, we’ve never seen a single plantain in the whole time we’ve lived here, not even at the Paddy’s Market. Also, our previously reliable standby, Vigo yellow rice mix, is not available. So we have to actually make the yellow rice from scratch.

However, there are plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables all the time. The tomatoes and limes came in bulk from the Paddy’s Market, an enormous, crowded greenmarket kind of like the Haymarket in Boston. It’s not a farmer’s market per se, so there aren’t organics or anything like that. It’s all family-run stalls selling wholesale products. The quality can be hit or miss. You can end up with a great bargain, or you can equally end up with a bag full of fruit that starts rotting two days later. On the whole, however, it’s a better selection than the supermarket.

It all starts with peeling garlic for the mojo sauce. The mojo is kind of like a garlic-lime vinaigrette that is used to dress everything. In Cuba, it is kept on the table as a condiment.

The mojo is made with ample amounts of freshly minced garlic. Normally one would use a mortar and pestle to grind the garlic into a paste with seasalt. We don’t have a lot of kitchen equipment, so we just make do with a cutting board and chef’s knife. The garlic is briefly simmered in an equally generous amount of hot olive oil and then allowed to cool. This takes the harsh edge off and brings out that gorgeously nutty quality of the cooked garlic. Freshly squeezed lime juice is wisked in until the sauce begins to emulsify. Add salt and cilantro to taste.

Next is to marinate the pork loin in some of the mojo for a few hours. Zest is taken from a few limes to add to the pork marinate.

Cherries have nothing to do with Cuba, as far as I know, but they were in season so I decided they would make a good dessert (which they did).

Watercress and tomatoes. The watercress is dressed with mojo for a delicious green salad with a little bitterness. This is a very simple dish, but gets quite a lot of compliments. Great tasting food should always be this easy!

Frijoles negros (black beans) simmering on the stove. This is a staple for any cuban meal, and stands alone well as a meal by itself with white rice. The black beans have been soaked for about four hours and then simmered with water, bay leaves, cumin, onion, green pepper and garlic, with a generous splash of olive oil. Some people add a tablespoon or two of vinegar towards the end. I prefer mine without.

Arroz con pollo (chicken and yellow rice). Back home we would simply make this with a packet of Vigo yellow rice mix. Here, I start by browning the chicken thighs in a skillet and lining the bottom of the pan with the chicken. Then quickly sauté onions, red peppers, garlic in some olive oil that had been seasoned/colored with annato seeds (achiote). Mix in a couple cups of uncooked white rice and spread this mixture over the chicken legs. Then pour in 4 cups of warm water, in which a generous pinch of saffron has been dissolving. This is how the dish looks after an hour covered in a medium oven.

Finally the piece de resistance. Oven roasted loin of pork, cuban style. The pork had been marinated and then basted in the mojo sauce. At the table it was served with more mojo on the side, so that each person could adjust piquancy, according to taste.