I love Korean food and decided to make some of my favorite dishes. Bibim bap and beef bulgogi are on the list of Korean recipes to try, but the first dish I wanted to attempt was sukju namul — bean sprout salad.

I found a recipe for Korean bean sprout salad using the Epicurious app for my iPhone, which is one my favorite apps. It pulled up the recipe for “Seasoned Soybean Sprouts” and even created a shopping list for me to use when I went to EarthFare to pick up ingredients.

It’s probably one of the simplest dishes to make. You only need a pound of sprouts, a green onion, some garlic cloves, sesame seeds, sesame oil, chili powder, salt, and water. Put it all together (after boiling the beans for a few minutes) and you’ve got sukju namul!

I was going to take a photo of my creation, but after waiting until it chilled a little bit, I was so hungry that I ate it up. (Not the entire pound though. I did have leftovers for the next day.) I’m pretty sure I’ll make some more soybean sprout salad in the coming weeks, so I’ll photograph it then.

Now that I’m on this Korean cuisine kick, I’ve been scouring the web for recipes and tips. I found this awesome site called Cooking Korean Food with Maangchi. It is an amazing website created by a lady named Maangchi, who is not even a professional chef. She’s just a wonderful cook who loves teaching others how to make great-tasting Korean food.

Maangchi has instructional videos for almost every single Korean recipe you can think of. But what’s awesome is that she invites you to submit your comments and photos of your own Korean cooking successes. She’s got great fans, and she’s built an awesome online community. You can subscribe to her podcast or follow Maangchi on Twitter for the latest recipes.

I’m checking out Maangchi’s site and my Epicurious app for some ideas on what to make next. I think it should be beef bulgogi, but I’m eager to make some the Korean omelette rolls as well. Maangchi’s video for making “gye ran mal yee” looks simple, so I might have to make the egg side dishes first before I get into the bulgogi.

Oh, I need to stop writing this post now. I’m getting hungry again!

Egg side dishes from Maangchi on Vimeo.

Photo by Daniel Y. Go