/
1x
Advertisement
Proudly Canadian, obsessively Toronto. Subscribe to Toronto Life!
Food & Drink

Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles

We’re asking Toronto’s top chefs to flex their home-cooking chops and walk us through the recipes they make for friends, family and themselves

By Caroline Aksich| Photography by Caroline Aksich
Copy link
Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
Kang’s homemade guksu, topped with kimchi, a hard-boiled egg and some cucumber

More Chef Snacks

Snack Time: How chef Anthony Rose makes his favourite salmon dip
Food & Drink

Snack Time: How chef Anthony Rose makes his favourite salmon dip

Both of Jeff Kang’s two Queen West restaurants—tasting-menu driven Canis and wine bar Après—are about modern-Canadian cooking, through and through. The menus pull flavours from across the globe (torched mackerel with leeks and a dollop of ravigote, sumac-dusted glazed lamb ribs, clams with ’nduja, dandelion pesto–tossed tagliatelle with chanterelles), but Korean cuisine is seldom featured. At home, however, the Seoul-born chef cooks mostly Korean dishes.

Kang’s mom was a great cook, and she would make everything from scratch: sauces, preserves, noodles. She learned a lot from her own mom, who grew up in North Korea. “I grew up eating guksu because my mom was vegan, and it’s probably the healthiest thing that I like to eat,” says Kang.

Here’s what you’ll need to make Kang’s mom’s guksu, a cold noodle dish. Editor’s note: Skip right to boiling some packaged wheat noodles, if you don’t plan on making your own.

Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
The noodles on the left are the ones Kang boils when he doesn’t feel like making his own from scratch.
The ingredients

200 grams of all-purpose flour 20 grams of rice flour 1 pinch of baking soda 1 pinch of salt OR 1 package of wheat noodles 2 cups of kimchi (Kang used a mix of radish stems and cabbage) 2 tablespoons of gochujang 3 tablespoons of soy sauce 3 tablespoons of rice vinegar 3 tablespoons of sugar 2 tablespoons of perilla or sesame oil 1 small cucumber 1 boiled egg

The recipe

For the dough, Kang combines the all-purpose flour, rice flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl.

Advertisement

He mixes the dry ingredients, adds a bit of water, then stirs the mixture until it begins to clump. Then he kneads it and adds a few more drops of water, if needed, until he gets a ball of firm dough. “You have to knead it a lot to develop the gluten,” he says.

Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
He’s a knead-y guy, Kang.

He passes the dough through his Imperia electric pasta machine, and then leaves it to sit in the fridge for three to 12 hours.

Then he passes the chilled dough through the pasta roller about 10 times, until the dough is paper thin.

Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
The dough’s ready to go.

He then dusts the sheets with flour, portions them and runs them through the pasta cutter.

Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
Noods!

For the sauce, Kang mixes whichever kinds of kimchi he has around. For this particular bowl, he used a mix of radish stems and some cabbage kimchi that his wife, Crystal Lee, made back in December. If he’s being lazy, he’ll just cut the kimchi straight in the bowl using a pair of kitchen scissors.

Advertisement
Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
Kang chops up some cabbage kimchi.

He always adds a bit of the kimchi liquid, too.

Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
And adds in some juice from the radish stem kimchi.

Then in goes the vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, gochujang and perilla oil. The older the kimchi is, the more sour it tastes. If it’s too sour, he’ll lighten up on the vinegar and add a bit more sugar.

Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
Add gochujang to taste.

After the noodles are boiled, he runs them under cold water to chill them and to remove the gluten.

Then he tosses the noodles with the sauce, garnishes each bowl with a hard-boiled egg and some julienned cucumber.

Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
Throw a hard-boiled egg in there for some protein.

Here’s Kang and his wife, Lee, enjoying some guksu with Dong Go, their eight-year-old toy poodle.

Advertisement
Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles
Lee and Kang enjoy the fruits of their labour in front of a jealous Dong Go.

We see you, Dong Go.

Snack Time: How chef Jeff Kang makes his favourite kimchi noodles

NEVER MISS A TORONTO LIFE STORY

Sign up for Table Talk, our free newsletter with essential food and drink stories.

By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy.
You may unsubscribe at any time.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Caroline Aksich, a National Magazine Award recipient, is an ex-Montrealer who writes about Toronto’s ever-evolving food scene, real estate and culture for Toronto Life, Fodor’s, Designlines, Canadian Business, Glory Media and Post City. Her work ranges from features on octopus-hunting in the Adriatic to celebrity profiles.

Advertisement
Advertisement

More Food and Drink

Inside the Latest Issue

The June issue of Toronto Life features our annual ranking of the best new restaurants. Plus, our obsessive coverage of everything that matters now in the city.