Korean Style Beef Stir Fry Recipe

Beef Stir-Fry Gangnam Style

Have you ever cooked with kimchi, pronounced [KIHM-chee]  also spelled kimchee?

Do you know what kimchee is?

I heard of it but really had no idea what it is until I adapted this recipe from one of my cooking magazines. It is served with this Korean beef stir fry.

Kimchee is a Korean pickled side dish made with fermented vegetables including napa cabbage, ginger, radish scallion, cucumber and I’m guessing whatever is available. Added to these vegetables are a variety of spices and seasonings depending on what region of Korea you are living.

For the record, Kimchee is the national dish of Korea and one of the most important ingredients in Korean cuisine. I read that in Korea people say “kimchi” when they smile for photos.

I searched Amazon and found dozens of books dedicated to kimchi so you can see its importance.

For this recipe my wife picked up two jars of kimchi from the local supermarket. Can you imagine finding kimchi anywhere but a Korean market 15 years ago?

One of the jars was mild, the other spicy. I chose to use the mild in this dish so my girls would try it.

Stir-Fry Technique

This recipe calls for using a stir-fry technique where you cook the ingredients (usually uniform in size) in a hot pan (wok) in a small amount of oil. Classic stir-fry (Chao technique) cooks the ingredients in a particular order but I’ll talk about that in another post soon.

Serve with Noodles

The recipe said to serve with mung bean noodles because they absorb the liquids created when preparing the dish and they don’t have much flavor on their own.

I used Thai Kitchen’s Stir-Fry Rice Noodles and had to laugh when I read on the box they were “Linguini_Style”. That’s what I’m looking for….Italian style Thai rice noodles.

The noodles I used took about 10 to 15 minutes to prepare so plan accordingly.