It’s been a year since I’ve been back from Korea and one of the things I miss eating is jjajangmyeon (black bean noodles).  While studying in Seoul, I ordered (or at least I had the front desk ahjusshi help me) jjajangmyeon a couple times when I got hungry at night.  One of the beautiful things is that they deliver so you don’t have to go anywhere.  This is a dish that many Koreans eat, a dish that you see in dramas and variety shows all the time.  It’s comforting and delicious and since I left, I haven’t been able to find a place that serves jjajangmyeon.  I found a recipe and decided to try it out via Maangchi.

The recipe is simple and I learned my lesson, again.  I always tend not to follow the recipe and add too much of an ingredient because I think it’s not doing what it’s supposed to be doing.  This is what happened with the potato starch.  The starch is used to make the sauce thicker, but I kept adding more and more starch because the sauce didn’t seem to be thickening (also I was using a teaspoon and I wasn’t sure if it was a 1/2 or 1 tsp…).  Later I realized, when the sauce is sitting while the noodles are cooking, this is when the sauce thickens.  In the end, my sauce ended up very potatoey and starchy.  I learned my lesson so next time, hopefully it’ll be closer to how it’s supposed to taste!