Jjamppong (Spicy Seafood Noodle Soup)

Jjamppong is made by stir-frying pork, seafood and vegetables in a very hot wok, pouring in stock and simmering briefly, then ladling the soup over boiled wheat noodles. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture calls it, together with jajangmyeon, one of the everyday favorites of the Korean-Chinese restaurant, and records two competing origin stories. In the Korean account, Shandong Chinese living in Incheon in the late 19th century reworked their own chaomamian (炒碼麵), a soup noodle topped with stir-fried ingredients, into something sweeter and hotter for Korean customers, and the dish picked up a Japanese word meaning a jumble of different things.

In the Japanese account, the name belongs first to Nagasaki, where Chen Pingshun, founder of the Chinese restaurant Shikairo, created a mild noodle soup for poor Chinese students in the late 19th century; the encyclopedia relays the story that the name grew from the students' dialect greeting, misheard by Japanese diners. Chinese-cuisine researcher Yong Pyeong-won, writing in 2026, sets Chen's arrival in Nagasaki in 1892 and the restaurant's opening in 1899, and notes that in colonial Seoul the soup was eaten in the grander Chinese restaurants rather than as cheap street fare. The two ports thus ended up sharing one name for two quite different Chinese-style noodle soups. The wider story of this cuisine is told in Korean-Chinese food.

The red broth is newer than most diners assume. Food columnist Hwang Gwang-hae, in a 2015 Weekly Hankook piece, writes that through the 1960s the dish was usually sold as junghwa udong, "Chinese udon," and that jjamppong became established as a menu name of its own from the 1970s. Yong dates the change in color to the early 1970s, when cooks began adding gochugaru and chili oil; the older soup was pale. Hwang also links the shift to fresh and frozen seafood reaching inland restaurants once expressways were built, replacing dried seafood. See capsaicin and spicy food and noodles in Korean history.

• Seafood protein: squid, shrimp and mussels supply lean protein, vitamin B12 and selenium. See seafood, omega-3 and mercury.
• A bowl full of vegetables: cabbage, onion, zucchini and carrot add vitamin C, vitamin A and some fiber.
• Chili: gochugaru brings capsaicin and carotenoids; research on capsaicin is ongoing. See capsaicin and spicy food.

• Ordinary jjamppong: pork and mixed seafood — the encyclopedia lists squid, shrimp, conch and rehydrated sea cucumber — with onion, cabbage, carrot, zucchini, bamboo shoot, mushrooms and chili.
• Gul-jjamppong and samseon-jjamppong: an oyster version and a richer "three delicacies" version with more and pricier seafood, both named by the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture.
• Jeolla's jjamppong towns: Hwang describes Gunsan's jjamppong houses, rooted in the port's old Chinese community, and a "white but spicy" style in Iksan made hot with chili without turning the broth red.