Why I Eat Black Bean Noodles Every Valentine's Day

February 08, 2019 Admin 0 Comments

Table for One is a column by Senior Editor Eric Kim, who loves cooking for himself—and only himself—and seeks to celebrate the beauty of solitude in its many forms, even on Valentine’s Day.

If Americans have delivery pizza, then Koreans have jjajangmyeon (often romanized as jajangmyeon), a popular noodle dish with a salty-perfect, fermented black bean gravy studded with fatty pork. “Jjajangmyeon is everybody’s favorite food,” YouTube star Maangchi writes on her blog. In Korea, you can order it over the phone and have a bowl of it delivered to your door in a matter of minutes. It’s not uncommon to see delivery men biking around the city with huge steel boxes on the backs of their bikes, filled with white plastic bowls of these incredible black bean noodles, tightly wrapped with cling film and served alongside small dishes of danmuji (Korean pickled daikon radish, often luridly yellow in color) and raw white onion (which tastes great doused in vinegar and dipped in black bean sauce). Once you finish your bowl, you can leave it outside your door, unwashed and all, and the delivery person will come back in a few hours to retrieve it.

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