Souper Freak

Today Tyler and I made an awesome discovery: Woo Ri Food Market, a family-owned Korean grocery located on Fillmore between O’Farrell and Geary. I just gushed about how wonderful this place is on Yelp so won’t do that all over again here. But because of this place and its very helpful staff, I have added two new ingredients to my repertoire: gochujang, a red chili paste that’s similar in its spicy-sweetness to Sriracha but with the added nuttiness of fermented soybeans, and perilla leaf, sometimes known as sesame leaf, which Tyler just recognized is essentially the same as shiso leaf, the sort of mint-licorice-tasting garnish that often appears on sushi platters (shiso is indeed the Japanese member of the perilla leaf family). (Also check out this really interesting perilla “sandwich” recipe that we plan to try, but probably with ground turkey instead of ground beef.)

My desire to find a local Korean market came while searching for tonight’s dinner recipe. I first thought about making lasagna noodle roll-ups (but decided it sounded too heavy) and then homemade seitan sausages (will definitely be trying this sometime soon!) but knew as soon as I came upon this Korean Spicy Cold Noodles recipe that this was just the summery dish I was hoping for.

While at Woo Ri Food Market, I saw that they sell gimbap, the vegetarian Korean “sushi” rolls that I’ve come to love from getting them downtown at John’s Snack and Deli (where John’s mom comes in everyday to make the gimbap fresh and where you can apparently get “suicide” kimchi burritos, which I haven’t had but just might have to try). The guys at Woo Ri Food Market told me that their rolls are made fresh everyday according to their grandmother’s recipe.

From there I noticed that they have a whole selection of homemade prepared foods — and I got to try about half a dozen of them. (I think they were eager to reward my enthusiasm.) I tried a delicious smoked fish of some sort, spicy marinated tofu, fresh kimchi, some fabulous seaweed-looking salad, and even some hot and spicy raw octopus. We purchased a little variety of things we’d tried, and were again rewarded when he threw in a serving of spicy hot wings for free. (They were a little crispy for my taste but Tyler will eat ‘em.)

And so tonight with our array of authentic ingredients and Woo Ri compliments, we made spicy cold korean noodles. I mixed up the most important ingredient — the sweet and spicy red sauce — and tossed it with a hefty mountain of chilled cooked noodles. Then we each topped this with a garden variety of carrot, radish, cucumber, romaine lettuce, scallions, and shredded perilla leaves. With this we put a slice of the spicy tofu from Woo Ri.

Delicious? Satisfying? Yes. Unbelievably, lip-numbingly, mouth-murderingly hot? YES. Thank God we had plenty of beer or I think we might have died.  We kept piling on more and more veggies to help absorb some of the heat.

Will we be making this again? Yes, definitely — but I think next time I’ll ignore the recipe’s call for four tablespoons of gochujang and take it down a notch!