Hoon shows how to build a pasta salad three ways: noodles, vegetables, and dressing. He makes a Korean-barbecue version with gochujang, mirin, and sesame oil, mixing Italian pasta with Korean flavors for something sweet, spicy, and savory.
This pasta salad tastes like Korean barbecue. Once you learn the framework, you can improvise any kind of pasta salad and make it your own. Let me show you how. The pasta salad framework has 3 parts: pasta, salad base, and dressing. For pasta noodles, anything goes. You can do Italian pasta noodles, soba noodles, whatever noodles you love. For the salad base, mix fresh veggies, onions, pickles, cheese, protein, and nuts. For dressing: acid, oil, salt, pepper, herbs, and seasonings. For the bulgogi pasta salad, I'm using this wide thick pasta. For the salad base, I am using carrots, red bell pepper, and of course bulgogi, white onions, Korean green pepper, green onions. For the dressing, I'm using garlic, gochujang, Korean red pepper flakes, mirin, plum extract, soy sauce, honey, sesame oil, pepper, ginger powder, and some mayo if you want a bit of that creamy taste. After making several classic pasta salads with this framework, it clicked for me. Pasta salad is endlessly flexible and forgiving, perfect for improvising. I was cooking for friends and wanted something unexpected. What if Korean barbecue flavors lived in pasta salad? And this is how the bulgogi pasta salad came to be. And there you have it, a delicious bulgogi pasta salad that's sweet with a kick, savory and fresh from all those veggies, tossed with perfect Italian pasta. Totally unexpected Italian-Korean comfort food fusion at its finest. What would be your pasta salad combo? Let me know in the comments. I'm Hoon from Cook Improv. Keep improvising.
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