Noodle Therapy : Bibim Gooksoo with Peaches
Noodle Therapy : Bibim Gooksoo with Peaches
Songsoo Kim introduces her new column with a summery recipe for spicy cold so-myeon with peaches.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this weekly slot, our roster of five rotating columnists share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Songsoo Kim.
If you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running. Subscribing will give you access to the whole Vittles back catalogue – including Vittles Restaurants, Vittles Columns, and our archive of cookery writing. A Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year.
Noodle Therapy 1: Bibim Gooksoo with Peaches
Songsoo Kim introduces her new column on the restorative power of noodles, with a summery recipe for spicy cold so-myeon with peaches. Plus a progressing playlist by Frankie Howard (aka Onebody Problem) to listen to as you cook.
In my heydays of working as a chef, by the end of my shift my whole body would ache from running around. Sometimes I felt like I was back in highschool basketball drill practice, shuffling left-left-left then right-right-right, pivot with left-foot with plate in hand, pivot-right with a pan in hand. The pace of restaurants is so fast and physical that even though I remember satisfied guests and laughter with colleagues, at the end of the day, I always felt done, stretched to my limits. On days off, my eyes would be open, but my body would say, ‘No, thank you.’ But eventually I would get up, and often, I would cook something simple to savour the slowness of the day.
On these days, it was noodles that would usually come to my mind. I would dream about long noodles swirled and wrapped around chopsticks, the strands unravelling with the tastes of sour kimchi, soy sauce, freshly crushed sesame seeds, cucumbers, slender wisps of seaweed, and chilli oil. Thinking about the comfort of their textures, the satisfaction of slurping them, would pull me up from my horizontal position and encourage me to start nursing my adrenaline-shot body. For years, the simple but adventurous act of making noodles has been a ritual for me. I’ve learned that, even on hard days, a sense of relief enters as I begin to cook them, and I think, ‘Maybe it’s not too bad.’ Making something so quick and easy and then eating it with leisure feels like nothing short of a luxury.
And so, I present Noodle Therapy, four recipes for noodle dishes in which I am inviting you into my noodle rituals. In this column, I use noodles with their visual and textural lives intact. I approach these recipes like doodling on a blank piece of paper, contemplating the colours and textures of the present season, mixing the ingredients that come from them into a noodle bowl. These are also good fridge-clearing recipes – the toppings I propose can often be replaced with whatever you have available.
There’s a noodle bowl for every mood: Taiwanese miaoli flower petal broad noodles for deep comfort and quick release, so-myeon for quick cooking and warm days, linguine for when the temperature drops. But what ties these noodle recipes together is that they take me back to my intuition, encourage me to follow my gut, and make me fall in love with cooking all over again. I hope they can do the same for you.
Bibim gooksoo: peachy summertime noodles
In Korean, ‘bibim’ means to mix and ‘gooksoo’ means noodles, so ‘bibim gooksoo’ describes any mixed noodle dish. I often eat these cold noodles as a summer lunch, as is common in countries like Japan and Korea, where the heat and humidity can be suffocating at this time of year. For me, the yellows and pinks of a ripe peach are among the truest expressions of summer, and I sometimes buy one on my way back from work, not even bothering to wash it before I bite in, delighting in a life that has given this fruit to me. The sour skin and sweet aromatic flesh of peaches also work perfectly in this recipe, whose sweet and spicy red sauce for the noodles almost matches the feeling of a hot day.
Serves 1 (but can be easily doubled)
Time 15 mins
