unchienne

For regular ramen, I usually stick to just an egg. Sometimes I’ll add tabasco to give it a kick.

However, with Korean ramen, like Shin ramen, I put in oodles of stuff. Mostly green onion, kimchi, raw frozen seafood (they sell a mixed version usually intended for paella and such in most supermarkets), gochujang, spam, or a clam or two. Just a mix and match of those ingredients makes for some excellent ramen.

A word of warning about ramen. It’s extremely salty and has almost no nutritional value. If you still want to eat it, try adding vegetable matter to it such as carrot, onions, spinach, broccoli, etc…

I’m on an extreme budget as well (got laid off last year and still haven’t found employment), and I find that eating Korean is fairly inexpensive since rice makes up the bulk of the meal. Once you have your main seasonings, a soup, kimchi, and some side dishes are all I make on the weekends and just eat that with rice for the rest of the week. ‘Course, I don’t know how you’d feel about eating Korean everyday. I grew up on the stuff, but I know some of my non-Korean friends think I’m crazy for eating rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner everyday.

Based on what my non-Korean friends enjoyed whenever I took them to Korean restaurants, I’d say get some mandu or seafood pancake as an appetizer and try the bulgogi or bibimbap if you’re not wanting to be too adventurous. My friends found most of the stuff to be too spicy, but really enjoyed the meats and the various banchan.

Alex pretty much nailed the question on the head, but I thought I’d list my cooking staples as well:

Garlic, fish sauce, green onions, hot pepper flakes, soy sauce, MSG (controversial as a lot of people don’t use it), seasame oil, seasame seeds, seaweed (usually seasoned gim and kelp), tofu, kimchee, spicy and regular soy bean paste, kosher or sea salt, thai bird chillies, dried anchovy teabags, corn tea, beef dashida, rice.

Most dishes require more ingredients, but these are the things that, if I didn’t have an Asian Market nearby, would be what I’d stock up on to make most of my dishes.

Cool article. Thaks for posting the link to it. I normally buy whichever one seems popular…which is usually the one on sale. ;) Which in most cases is the Wang or Chung Jong Won brand. Wwang is a bit sweet for my tastes though.

Gochujang can be doctored in most cases…add a bit of garlic, sugar, vinegar, etc…to fit your tastes

What I want to know is which is the best Tangjang. Here lately I’ve been getting tangjang that’s too dark and bitter. Makes my tangjangjigae taste not too good. What’s your personal favorite?

I’ve got some right now, and I was tempted to subsitute with it once I ran out of traditional soy, but the taste is very different (imo). I believe soup soy sauce has some kind of broth added in…at least mine tastes like that. The flavor reminds me of a soy sauce/anchovy broth combo or perhaps beef dashida.

Mom loves putting this on a bowl of mandu-gook, and I’ve seen recipes call for it, but if you do buy a bottle, get a relatively small one because you won’t use it near as often as you do regular soy sauce. Mine’s been sitting around for a year now, and you can barely tell it’s been used.

cat76, if using crabs and squeamish and guilty (like me) about hacking into live crabs, simply freeze them until they die. There is nothing wrong with using frozen crabs as long as they were alive when they were put into the freezer. In fact, the large gejang company in Korea, called Crabland, uses the freezing method to allow their workers to handle the crabs without injury. In their preparation video on Youtube, the crabs are being fished out of iced water and are quite limp. It’s like putting them into hibernation mode and then they die “in their sleep” so to speak. I use this method whenever I make any crab dish. You don’t have to let them freeze overnight…usually a few hours does the trick. Or if you want a quicker result, you can plunge them into icy water. That’s what I do when I go fishing, I bring a cooler filled with icy water to put my “keeper” fish into b/c I can’t bear the thought of them swimming in slow de-oxygenating water and suffocating to death. Much better to just get it over and done with little fuss and no mess.

The Farmers Market in Atlanta sells prepared soy and spicy gejang in their deli section. Been doing it for years, and always use frozen swimmer crab segments in their recipe. I imagine the risks of getting sick from these are quite low as I have never been ill, and they sell dozens of them daily and have for years. The risk of illness actually comes from the possibility of the crab already having been dead or killed and then left out where bacteria can reproduce. If frozen directly after death, it would create no more worries than your average sushi bar/take-out sushi which also uses previously frozen ingredients. In fact, if they are frozen below a certain temp, it’s actually better for you as the extreme cold eliminates many harmful parasites.

Just food for thought.

I can’t read Korean, but I used one of those translator pages, and it has several ingredients listed. Much more, in fact, than I had originally suspected.

Don’t have any portions listed as the translation was rough, but I thought I’d jot down which ingredients I did see:

soy sauce

ginger

seasoned rice wine

corn syrup

minced garlic

ginger juice

chili powder

black pepper

a few drops of seasme oil

salt (to taste)

chopped green onions