Chocolate Popsicles

Summer in Seattle is a gift that the city gives you as an apology for nine months of gray. The sun came out on Monday and stayed. The temperature was 75 degrees. I walked to the SoDo kitchen in a t-shirt. The Olympic Mountains were visible from the loading dock, which only happens on the clearest days, and the fact that I noticed the mountains from a loading dock while packing Korean meal kits felt like the kind of scene a novelist would write to illustrate something about beauty and labor coexisting. I am not a novelist. I am an engineer who makes kimchi. But I noticed the mountains, and they were beautiful, and I stood there for thirty seconds before Grace said, "Stephanie. The boxes will not pack themselves."

I have started recipe development for the September subscription launch. The transition from one-off boxes to monthly subscriptions requires a massive expansion of the recipe library — twelve months of unique recipes, four cards per month, forty-eight cards in the first year. I am building a master recipe spreadsheet. It is the most complex spreadsheet I have ever made, and I once built a spreadsheet that modeled the behavior of 14 million Alexa voice interactions. The recipe spreadsheet is harder because the recipes have to tell a story across twelve months — a journey through Korean cuisine from basics to advanced, from everyday banchan to holiday feasts, from kimchi 101 to homemade doenjang. Grace is my co-author. She sits at the kitchen table and lists recipes in Korean while I translate and adapt them. We are building a curriculum. We are building a library. I have not been this excited about a project since I built my first robot in eighth grade.

James and I went on a date on Saturday — our first real date in months. We went to a new Korean restaurant in Ballard that a friend recommended. It was small, twelve tables, run by a Korean couple from Daegu. The food was excellent. I had the jjajangmyeon — black bean noodles — which I have never attempted to make and which were so good I almost asked the chef for the recipe. I did not ask. I ordered a second bowl instead. James had the kimchi bokkeumbap and said, "This is not as good as yours." I said, "James. You do not have to say that." He said, "I know. It's true." It might have been true. It doesn't matter. What matters is that he said it, at a table in a restaurant, on a Saturday night, to his wife who has been sad about negative pregnancy tests and distracted by a dozen obligations and difficult to reach for weeks. He reached me. The jjajangmyeon helped.

Dr. Yoon this week: she asked me what I am afraid of, underneath the fertility anxiety. I said, "I am afraid that my body will not work. That the thing I was designed to do — the biological thing, the thing that Jisoo did at seventeen — I won't be able to do." She said, "You were not designed to do anything. You are not a machine. You are a person. And people's bodies have timelines that belong to the body, not to the plan." I said, "I am an engineer. I believe in plans." She said, "Your body is not a system you can debug." I know she's right. I hate that she's right.

The recipe this week is jjajangmyeon — the Korean-Chinese black bean noodles I ate on Saturday and have been obsessing over since. I am developing my own version. Chunjang (black bean paste), fried in oil until fragrant. Diced pork belly. Diced onion, zucchini, potato. Chicken stock. Cornstarch slurry to thicken. Served over thick wheat noodles (udon work beautifully). Topped with julienned cucumber and a raw egg yolk if you're feeling bold. The sauce is dark, glossy, sweet-savory, and deeply comforting. This is Korean comfort food at its most immediate — the dish you order when you want to be fed, not challenged. I needed to be fed this week. The noodles did the feeding.

I know I came here to talk about black bean noodles — and I will, eventually, when I’ve tested the recipe enough times to be proud of it. But it was 75 degrees on Monday, the mountains were out, and after a week that held a lot of hard feelings alongside a lot of good ones, what I actually made when I got home was these chocolate popsicles. Simple, cold, dark, a little sweet — the same qualities, honestly, that drew me to the jjajangmyeon in the first place. Some weeks you develop the ambitious recipe. Other weeks you pour chocolate into molds and put them in the freezer and stand at the loading dock looking at the Olympics.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 4 hours 10 minutes (includes freeze time) | Servings: 8 popsicles

Ingredients

2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons semi-sweet chocolate chips, melted
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon fine salt

Instructions

Warm the base. In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, whisk together the milk, heavy cream, cocoa powder, and sugar until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is smooth and just beginning to steam, about 3–4 minutes. Do not boil.
Add chocolate and vanilla. Remove from heat and whisk in the melted chocolate chips, vanilla extract, and salt until fully incorporated. Let the mixture cool for 10 minutes at room temperature.
Fill the molds. Pour the cooled mixture evenly into 8 popsicle molds, leaving about 1/4 inch of space at the top for expansion. Tap the molds gently on the counter to release any air bubbles.
Insert sticks and freeze. Insert popsicle sticks and transfer molds to the freezer. Freeze for at least 4 hours, or overnight, until completely solid.
Unmold and serve. To release, run warm water over the outside of each mold for 10–15 seconds and gently pull the stick. Serve immediately or wrap individual popsicles in wax paper and store in a zip-top bag in the freezer for up to 2 weeks.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chocolate Popsicles — The Summer Sweet That Caught Me Off Guard