Soy sauce: Gochujang is very salty and deeply savoury. Soy sauce adds the salty umami taste, but too much will reduce the vibrant red colour. Light soy sauce is best to preserve the colour, but I also use all-purpose soy sauce. You can omit the soy sauce and add salt (with water) to taste. Doenjang is a fermented bean paste, similar to the better-known Japanese miso paste. Though Japanese miso is fungus fermented and doenjang with a bacterial culture.

Spicy or Sweet– you decide! This recipe lets you add more heat or less depending on how spicy you like your food. For this recipe, I split the difference and made these noodles at a medium heat level. If you love spicy food, you will love this recipe! Heat up the oven to 200° C / 390° F and grab an old-fashioned (ideally steel not teflon coated) baking tray. See NOTES for the alternative. This almost always contains wheat flour, which is used to start the fermentation process. I have yet to find a gluten-free substitute. Ingredients: fermented soybean paste (water, soybeans, rice, salt, alcohol), water, sugar, chilli pepper powder (7.3%), sunflower oil, tomato puree, onion, spirit vinegar, garlic, salt. The sweetness is from the starch of cooked glutinous rice, cultured with enzymes during fermentation. Gochugaru, made from dried Korean chilli peppers, also contributes to the sweet taste.

How to make Gochujang Noodles:

Fridge: Keep any noodles and sauce mixed together in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 5 days. Other recipes to love Tip! You can adjust this recipe to the spice level of your choice. For a spicier dish, add up to half a tablespoon more of gochujang and a tablespoon less of maple syrup. To make the noodles less spicy, add only half a tablespoon of gochujang and a little more maple syrup. Pasta water - essential for binding the sauce together! Make sure to reserve some before draining the pasta. So in this vegan mapo tofu, we roughly grind the peppercorns with a mortar and pestle. Then fry them in 1 tbsp of oil. The oil is then drained and reserved and the peppercorns are discarded. Create aromatic mushroom base

Chung Jung One Gochujang Korean Chili Sauce is first on the list because it is an easy-to-find gochujang sauce that is both certified gluten-free and vegan-friendly! It is a gochujang sauce —not a paste — meaning it is mixed with other ingredients for a ready-to-eat flavor enhancer for many foods! It has a savory and spicy flavor with a hint of sweetness. As someone with celiac disease, I often struggle to explain gluten-free needs in my native language to people! It is even harder when mixing another language or culture into the mix. When living in South Korea, I constantly worried about the food ingredients. Did I explain my allergy well in a different language than my own? Did I read the ingredients properly? Do my friends understand the difficulty when eating out? I had all of those questions regularly. But I don’t believe this deviates significantly. And of course, this will still be delicious in its own right! How to make gluten free mapo tofu Roughly blitz and cook mushrooms Use roughly the same volume of chilli powder to doenjang and thin it with water as needed. If you have coarse gochugaru flakes (as in the picture below), grind it into powder before mixing it with the doenjang. Dissolve cornstarch in 2 tsp of water in a medium bowl to create cornstarch slurry, then add the remaining sauce ingredients and 2 tbsp of water. Mix well and adjust the level of spiciness (gochujang) to your taste.In a small bowl, stir together the plant based butter, brown sugar and gochujang paste until smooth. Set aside. Traditional gochujang is fermented outside in an earthenware container (jangdok, hangari, or onggi). However, thanks to the commercial production of gochujang (since the early 1970s), most Koreans now buy gochujang at grocery stores or markets.