Japchae is a veggie stir-fry made with glass noodles (dangmyeon 당면), very popular in Korea, especially during festivities. While the classic version includes meat, like beef and pork, and sometimes eggs, we made our vegan, with only plant-based ingredients.
Japchae means mixed vegetables, but don't let the simple name fool you! This recipe is easy to make, but it's rich, flavourful and so very colourful. It is truly worthy of celebration and will bring joy to your table (and belly), as it did ours!
The veggies we used are onions, a colourful selection of peppers, spinach, and mushrooms. We followed the advice of Korean cookbooks that suggest stir-frying veggies separately, to retain their isolated colour and flavour. It is indeed a good tip, but if you are low on time, feel free to stir-fry everything together.
The other cool thing about this recipe is the glass (cellophane) noodles. We loved them in our glass noodle pad thai and wanted to use them again in a recipe you would like as well. We think we hit the mark with this one!
There are many varieties of glass noodles. We suggest you use the one made from sweet potato starch, as it is the one traditionally used in Japchae. We also tried mungbean and arrowroot glass noodles, and they were yummy too.
A nice bowl of these Korean stir-fried noodles makes a balanced meal under 500 calories and provides 30% of your RDI for fibres, 34% RDI for proteins, and only 8% RDI for saturated fats. Scroll below to discover the other ingredients we used and follow our simple steps to get this done!