How to Make Korean Japchae with Steak

For this stir-fry, sizzle your beef and then bubble it away with all those noodles to get all the flavour into it. It's a very quick and easy japchae. Some onion, just sliced up. I'm just going to sort of place everything on a little plate here. Set up my wok clock of ingredients. Carrot, fine matchsticks will do. This is one of those dishes that you can just sort of knock up really quickly. Great for a snack, great for a dinner, great for a lunch, great for your breakfast. However you want to eat it. The key thing is quick. A little bit of red pepper. Again, finely sliced. And some cabbage. You don't need a lot for this. In fact, you don't need a lot of any of the vegetables because everything's sort of finely sliced up and it'll bulk out the noodles. But you want a nice balance of the noodles and the veg. So apart from the steak, I've got my wok clock of ingredients set up. My onions, carrot and then the softer or thinner cuts of veg that you want to keep nice and crunchy. So with the steak, you can use whatever steak you want for this. A fast or quick cooking steak helps. So like a primary cut, either rump or ribeye, sirloin. I'm just going to slice strips through the steak. We will season this ever so lightly. I quite like the fat on this as well. A little bit of salt, pinch of sugar and about a teaspoon of sesame oil and give that a good massage through. And then I've got my steak to sear and then my wok clock of veg along with some pre-soaked glass noodles. Now these are mung bean vermicelli. Traditional Japchae is made with a sweet potato noodle. I find that this is a little bit more accessible. Either or, glass noodles work a treat. The sauce for this simple stir-fried noodle dish. About a tablespoon of oyster sauce, just over a tablespoon. So one and a half tablespoons of light soy, about a teaspoon of dark soy sauce and a teaspoon of sesame oil. That sesame oil will just work nicely with the flavour, the seasoning of the steak too. That's going to be quite salty there, so you want about half a teaspoon of sugar to just balance that out. I've got some chicken stock just for adding in once all the ingredients and the sauce has gone in. What I'm going to do is I'm going to sear the steak first and then I'm going to place the seared steak over the noodles and bring it all back in at the end, just so that the steak doesn't overcook too quickly. Vegetable oil. Anything high heating works well here. You want to make sure that that oil is really smoking hot before the steak goes in. Your seasoned steak. Never lose that sizzle. I want that to caramelise, so I'm just going to let it sit and do its thing and then turn it once. That steak is still a little bit on the medium side. That's when I want to take it out and the seasoning and the steak itself would have kind of flavoured that oil. So from here you can just start to go around your what clock? Onions first. Steak and onions, can't go wrong. And it's a quick sear. Every 30 seconds you kind of add your next ingredient, especially because I've finely sliced or matchsticked the veg up. It doesn't take long to cook at all and it's really important to keep your onions or actually all the veg nice and crunchy. Cabbage in. My noodles and my steak can come back in and then you can see that smoke sort of building up, so that tells me that the wok's still nice and hot. My sauce can go in. Give that a nice fold through now. Pick up all the sauce with the noodles. I'm just going to allow the heat to build up a little more for the next 30 seconds before I pour a little bit of chicken stock around to allow that sauce to kind of really get into the noodles, allow the noodles to absorb the flavour. Nice sizzling sound and the chicken stock can go in. Let that come to a really lovely vigorous boil first and then give it a stir. You want to do this on a nice high heat until most of that sauce has sort of been sucked into and absorbed by those noodles. Then you cook it that way and so as you can see all the flavour is in the noodles and the veg and the beef as opposed to just sitting at the bottom of the wok. My hungry moment. That is so tasty, so simple but that high heat and understanding how to move that heat around the wok is really important.