Bibim Gooksu
Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from restaurateur Jenny Kwak's book, Dok Suni: Recipes from My Mother's Korean Kitchen.
Kwak also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page.
To read more about Kwak and Korean cuisine, click here.
This noodle dish is very gratifying on hot summer days when you want to eat something light, healthy, and refreshingly cold. The crisp, clean texture of the cucumber combined with the spiciness from kimchi, the tang from the rice vinegar and a subtle sweetness from the sugar makes the dish so good. The noodles are served over a bed of ice, then topped with this spicy salad-like mixture.
• Long, skinny Korean cucumbers, crisper than their American counterparts, are the perfect texture for this salad. If you can't get to a Korean market, common American Kirby cucumbers can be used instead. • Use kimchi that is overripe (more than 10 days old if made from scratch) to add the proper pungency to this dish. Kimchi is also available jarred in Asian grocery stores and the refrigerated section of some supermarkets. Keep it in the fridge for a few days to ripen. • Look for Korean or Japanese wheat-flour noodles (called somen) in Asian and gourmet grocery stores; Asian vermicelli (also called potato starch or glass rice noodles) can also be substituted.
