You know what you don't do when living with someone of Chinese extraction? Flaunt how delicious gochujang is. So, don't flaunt it. Just eat it.

Ingredients

• 1 lb/16 oz spaghetti [substitute any other noodles you want]
• 8 cups water
• 2 TBSP salted butter
• 5 cloves garlic
• 1 TBSP sriracha sauce [substitute any other chili sauce or the eponymous gochujang paste at 2x]
• 1 tsp crushed red pepper, optional [substitute half the amount of cayenne pepper or regular chili powder]
• 2 TBSP regular sugar [substitute maple syrup, brown sugar, or honey]
• 2 TBSP lime or lemon juice [substitute citrus zest or apple cider vinegar]

Materials

• Instant Pot
• colander or strainer
• small bowl to put reserved pasta water in
• flat object to stir the instant pot with
• garlic press
• measuring spoons

Method

Cooking the spaghetti requires a bit of math because I don't know what specific type of spaghetti you decided to grab.

1. Open up the Instant Pot and toss in your spaghetti (1 lb), taking care to retain the package the spagheti came in. The package has information you need on it.
2. Add 8 cups of water.
3. So your spaghetti and water are in the instant pot. Now you are going to look at the spaghetti package and go find the cooking directions. On there it should tell you to cook spaghetti for some low number-to-some higher number of minutes. We are only interested in the "some low number".
   
   Take that number and divide it by half, rounding down. This new number is important so remember it.
   
   Examples. 7 minutes on the package divided by half becomes 3.5 minutes which rounds down to 3 minutes. 3 minutes on the package divided by half becomes 1.5 minutes which rounds down to 1 minute. You get the point. If you struggle with this, send me an email and I'll help you out!
   
   
4. Toss the lid on, set the VENT to seal, and set the pasta to PRESSURE COOK at LOW pressure for that new time value you just figured out. And away the Instant Pot goes, doing its thing!
5. QUICK RELEASE the pressure and strain the cooked noodles from any remaining water, reserving some pasta water in the small bowl you have for this purpose.
6. Return the now-empty inner pot to the Instant Pot and set the Instant Pot to SAUTÉ with normal heat. Add the butter (2 TBSP).
7. Once the butter has melted and the instant pot screen reports "HOT", add the garlic (5 cloves) by putting it through the garlic press and into the Instant Pot, and stir until fragrant.
8. Add sriracha sauce (1 TBSP), sugar (2 TBSP), and the optional crushed red pepper (1 tsp) to the pot. Stir for a couple of seconds. Add a splash of reserved pasta water and deglaze and stir to form a pan-sauce.
9. Taste the sauce and adjust it to suit your preferences.
10. Add the cooked spaghetti and toss to coat in the sauce evenly. If the spaghetti seems dry, you can add a bit more pasta-cooking water.
11. Press CANCEL.
12. Add lime juice (2 TBSP). Toss to combine.
13. Dish out and serve.

Notes

This dish has no protein, so does well if topped with cubed tofu, seitan, tempeh, or basically any other vegetarian or vegan protein. If you are a carnivore, you can even top it with carnivorous proteins if you wish or set them to the side. It also does well paired with a nice single serve kimchi.

The sriracha + garlic + sugar give almost the same flavor profile as actual gochujang and given that this blog is all about a capsule kitchen and simple recipes, stocking a single ingredient for a single recipe just means the ingredient will be overlooked, forgotten, and eventually go bad. Instead, you'll find sriracha appearing in other recipes (1, 2, more to come I'm sure) in this recipe book, as well as garlic and sugar being staple pantry ingredients. These won't be forgotten and won't go bad. The only flavor missing is fermentation which is where the pairing of the kimchi, mentioned above, comes in.

If you use less than 1 lb of pasta, don't change anything else in the recipe. You'll just get more sauce in each bite. YUM!

Bibliography. I was inspired to this recipe from following Eric Kim, a simple recipe wizard with the New York Times Cooking section. It was actually a post on Reddit that tipped me off. I wanted to simplify it even more and adapt it to the Instant Pot - all that adaptation is mine, alone - so used a variety of other versions of the recipe to cross reference the essentials: Spoons of Flavor, Here's Your Dinner (who drizzles a bit of sesame oil on as a finisher, fyi), Sprinkles and Sprouts, and a different subreddit.