comment icon 92 more comments The short ribs are the most tender, the most fall-apart, the most worthy of tears because how are they so gooood?! Just peeking out on top of your noodle-y pile, next to some bright sautéed spinach, sprinkled with sesame seeds and swizzled with a little toasted sesame oil. Oh my. Oh my, oh my.
What Is Gochujang Sauce?
This little noodle-y wonder gets its deep and interesting spice from the gochujang sauce. If you’re not familiar, it is a sauce made from gochujang — a staple ingredient in Korean cooking with an absolutely delicious lingering heat and strong umami flavor — mixed with some other ingredients like soy sauce, vinegar, and a sweetener. Gochujang itself is a spicy-sweet-savory paste that is made from fermented soybeans, red chile pepper flakes, sticky rice, and salt and it is commonly used to flavor meat dishes, soups and stews, and sauces. You can read a little more about how it’s made and used from Christina Chaey over at Bon Appetit.
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Ingredients For Short Rib Noodle Soup
Because the gochujang sauce brings so much depth of flavor, especially when paired up with aromatics like ginger and garlic, the ingredient list itself isn’t too long!
trimmed short ribs, removed from the bone (it’s worth it to trim/prep before cooking for a top-notch soup experience)gochujang sauce tomato pasteminced fresh ginger, garlic & shallotbeef brothdry ramen noodles or any other stir-fry noodles spinachscallions, sesame seeds, and/or sesame oil for finishing
How To Make This Spicy Short Rib Noodle Soup
Because we’ve got our ol’ pal the Instant Pot working for us here, things come together relatively simply. Serve your soup bowls topped with the fall-apart short ribs, tuck in your sautéed spinach, sprinkle with scallions, sesame seeds, and sesame oil. YUM!
Make It Your Own
This recipe came to be after trying to replicate this beautiful bowl of goodness from The Daley Plate spotted over on Insta (years ago!). While not working from a particular traditional recipe, this dish definitely has notes of more culturally-specific spicy beef and noodle soup combos, like this homemade take on Shin Cup Style-Spicy Korean Ramyun Beef Noodle Soup or this Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup from Woks of Life, both of which sound absolutely delicious for a more traditional recipe. What we have here is a super slurpy, heat-you-from-the-inside-out broth/noodle combo that is the perfect base, and then you can really start to customize from there! We’ve tried a few different cuts of beef, short ribs being the fave for tenderness, but others definitely work! If you’re feeling chicken instead, you could totally do that. You could certainly keep it vegetarian, too, with a little veg stock and then maybe some marinated crisp tofu or oven-roasted mushrooms on top. So much possibility! If you’re not an Instant Pot owner, no worries, this dream can still be yours with a little more time. If you only have a package of ramen available? Perfect, toss that flavor packet out and then get that noodle block swimming. What we’re saying is this ginger, garlic, gochujang sauce combo is going to make absolutely anything sing. Fun soups forever!
More Noodle Dish To Love
Instant Pot Mac and Cheese (a classic made straight in the IP)Chili Garlic Instant Pot Noodles (woweeeeee, these are good!)Roasted Tomato Puttanesca (simple to make with lots and lots of flavor)
4.9 from 32 reviews This recipe is best served right after the noodles finish up cooking. If you wait too long before serving, the noodles can get mushy and absorb the extra broth. It would also work to make the short ribs and broth ahead of time, then add the noodles right before serving. I have tried this with other cuts of beef and I didn’t like it as much – they just didn’t get as tender. I’ve also tried cooking the short ribs with the bones and fat on them and while the flavor was good, the broth got way too oily and it was just a mess to try to pull the meat off. So in my opinion it’s worth doing the trimming before you cook. I bought packages of beef that were about 1.5 pounds so by the time I was removing the bones and fat, I was probably left with .75 pounds of the actual beef. That amount of meat + 2 noodle packages was about the right ratio for me! For the broth, I usually start with 4-5 cups but have definitely found myself needing to add more to the leftovers – the noodles like to soak up the liquid.
