Do you need one more side dish that goes well with Asian food? Bean sprout salad is a great side dish or salad recipe that’s very easy, economical, and healthy! I like serving bean sprout salad with BBQ, Japanese meal, or any Asian style meal. It’s great bento filler too if you need just one more dish!
Bean Sprout Salad – Namul ナムル
Namul (나물) refers to Korean seasoned vegetable dish. In Japan, we enjoy many Korean or Korean-inspired dishes. The bean sprout salad is a pretty common dish housewives in Japan make. We call this dish Moyashi no Namuru もやしのナムル (bean sprout namul), the original Korean dish for this dish is sukju-namul.
My family enjoys this dish on hot summer days as I like to make bean sprout salad ahead of time and chill in the refrigerator before serving. Here are some cooking tips for this very easy recipe.
Cooking Tips for Bean Sprout Salad
1.Removing Brown & Stringy Roots
When you learned how to cook, did you learn to remove the brown part and stringy root part of bean sprouts? My mom taught me to do that when she asked me to prep bean sprouts.
Growing up in Japan, helping my mom in the kitchen simply meant prep work, not actual cooking. Maybe because I wasn’t so enthusiastic about cooking. I remember being in the kitchen (doing all the prep work) which was a chore more than anything. Washing dirty dishes and drying them (no dish washer), prepping ingredients (like washing and peeling vegetables), wrapping hundreds of gyoza… I think my daughter is way more enthusiastic about cooking as a 9-year-old than I was back then. After many many years later, when I was cooking my own meal in my apartment kitchen in the US, I realized that I learned so much about basics of cooking through my ears and eyes from those “prepping” days in my mom’s kitchen. Back to the recipe. So what’s the reason why we remove those brown parts and stringy roots? It is because that bean sprouts taste much better without them. You may not notice the subtle difference if the bean sprouts were prepped with strong flavorful sauce or ingredients, but you will notice the cleaner flavor and texture when you eat them raw or with simple seasonings.
Recently, I did learn that the stringy part is nutritious. To me it’s the perfect excuse to skip removing brown/stringy parts, doesn’t it?
2. Blanch Bean Sprouts for 1.5 Minutes
This probably depends on each person’s preference but my suggestion is to cook for just one and a half minutes. After draining, the bean sprouts will continue to cook with remaining heat. You can adjust the timing slightly but it should be between 1 to 2 minutes.
3. Drain Water Well
You don’t want to dilute the seasonings, so make sure to drain well before adding bean sprouts to the sauce. Also, bean sprouts tend to go bad fast; so avoid soaking them in water especially if you want to keep them a bit longer.
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