It’s September and you’re wondering why you’re still sweating so damned much. You like the summer, what with the melons and the tomatoes, but the fact of the matter is that you’re going through two shirts a day and it’s getting pretty old. All the cold food you’ve been eating this summer—salads, plates of sliced salami—are, in the end, really just room temperature foods. Cool foods. You’re ready for something cold.
The Koreans hear you, brother, and they’re talking about naeng myun. These aren’t just cold noodles, they’re noodles bobbing around in soup with chunks of ice.
To be honest, there’s something about this that seemed unappealing to me at first. I mean, what does icy chunks say but “watery” and “flavorless”? Flavors are muted when cold. Make the compounds that create aromas colder and their molecules slow down, stop bouncing off each other, and stop casting themselves into the air and your nose. So, literally, you don’t smell and taste them as much.
But this naeng myun, this does not suffer from blandness. This laughs at your blandness. It tells your blandness to go screw itself.
My favorite versions keep the soup clean, a basic beef broth tarted up with a shot of vinegar. The flavor of raw garlic grows, blooming as you eat, and the chili that was almost imperceptible on your first frigid sip also blossoms. By the time you’re halfway through the bowl, the icy soup and the warm feeling on your lips play off one another; it’s fun and kind of schizophrenic, like the exhibits in kids’ museums that make you grab hot and cold pipes until you can’t tell which is which.
The garnishes couldn’t be simpler. Maybe there’s a slice or two of cold beef, or a hard-boiled egg. There are some sesame seeds. And then there are slices of daikon radish, cucumber, and sweet Asian pear—all crisp and crunchy, their bite magnified by their coldness.
And they provide fabulous contrast to the noodles, which are sometimes made of buckwheat, but the versions made with arrowroot are among the weirdest, funnest noodles I’ve ever come across. They’re a color of brown I first wanted to call chocolate, then I wanted to call coffee… but then I realized I was just pussyfooting around the fact that they are the color of murk. Dark but weirdly translucent, they disappear in waves below the rust-colored broth and re-emerge at the other end of the bowl. Heavy and chewy, they bounce visibly as soon as you lift them with your chopsticks; their movement flows like liquid. You chew them seemingly for sport, since they don’t really break up all that much between your teeth, and many of the noodles will slide down your gullet intact, carried by the slushy broth and the glowing warmth traveling down your throat.
You chew, you slurp, and suddenly you realize that the soup chills your insides while your chili-induced sweat cools your skin. So maybe you will have to change shirts again, but this time you won’t mind.
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