Namul — three Korean side salads
Namul is not one dish but a method: the vegetable is blanched, squeezed dry, and only then seasoned. The squeezing is where everything is decided — wet spinach dilutes a sesame dressing within minutes and instead of a salad you get greens in a puddle. The three vegetables are made separately, because each has its own timing and its own seasoning.
Your own work in that: 0 min.
- Blanching 15 min
- Squeezing 10 min
- Seasoning 15 min
Step by step
0 / 6 doneBlanch the spinach 40 seconds and ice it
Drop the spinach into boiling water for 40 seconds from the moment it goes under, and move it straight into iced water. The cold stops the cooking and fixes the colour — spinach tipped into a colander keeps cooking in its own heat and is grey within a minute.
Ingredients: 400 g spinach · 1 tbsp sesame oil · 1 clove garlic · 1 tsp soy sauce
Straight from boiling water into ice.Squeeze the spinach genuinely hard
Gather the spinach into a ball and wring it with both hands until it stops dripping. Squeezed spinach looks like a pitifully small ball, as it should — the only way it can take up dressing instead of diluting it.
Ingredients: 400 g spinach · 1 tbsp sesame oil · 1 clove garlic · 1 tsp soy sauce
Squeeze until it stops dripping — a small ball remains.Season the spinach by hand, not with a spoon
Pull the ball apart with your fingers, add the crushed garlic, sesame oil and soy sauce and rub the seasoning through with your hand. A spoon only mixes the surface; a hand separates the compressed strands and seasons each one. That is how it is done in Korean homes, and the difference shows.
Ingredients: 400 g spinach · 1 tbsp sesame oil · 1 clove garlic · 1 tsp soy sauce
Seasoning rubbed in by hand, not stirred with a spoon.Boil the sprouts three minutes and squeeze
Boil the sprouts for 3 minutes — they should soften while staying crisp at the root. Rinse under cold water and squeeze, more gently than the spinach. Season with salt, sesame oil and chopped spring onion.
Ingredients: 300 g bean sprouts · 1 tbsp sesame oil · 2 pcs spring onions · ½ tsp salt
Fry the carrot rather than boiling it
Cut the carrot into fine matchsticks and fry in the neutral oil for 3 minutes with the chopped garlic and salt, then take off the heat and toss with the sesame oil. The carrot is the only one of the three that goes into a pan rather than boiling water — boiled, it turns watery and loses its sweetness.
Ingredients: 300 g carrots · 1 tbsp neutral oil · 1 tbsp sesame oil · 1 clove garlic · ½ tsp salt
Serve in three separate bowls
Scatter each with sesame seeds and serve in three separate bowls, unmixed. Banchan goes in the middle of the table and everyone takes a little — mixing them would undo the whole point of seasoning them separately.
Ingredients: 3 tbsp sesame seeds
Before you start
They keep a few days
In separate containers in the fridge they are good for 2–3 days; eat the sprouts first, as they lose their freshness fastest. That is why banchan is made once and brought out at every meal — a Korean fridge usually holds several kinds at a time.
Other vegetables, same method
Courgette, aubergine, Chinese cabbage, young radish leaves, burdock root. The principle never changes: brief blanching, hard squeezing, seasoning with sesame oil and garlic. Only the cooking time varies.
Sesame oil goes in last
Always off the heat and always at the end. Heated, it quickly loses its aroma, and that aroma is the main flavour in namul — it is a seasoning, not a frying fat.
