Tteokbokki
Chewy cylinders of rice cake simmered in a sweet, hot gochujang sauce with fish cakes and spring onion — Korea's best-loved street snack.
What makes it tteokbokki
- Garae-tteok, cylinders of plain rice cake, soft and chewy.
- Gochujang, gochugaru and sugar — sweet first, then hot.
- Eomuk, fish cakes, cooked in the sauce.
Where it comes from
Its ancestor is gungjung tteokbokki, a court dish of rice cakes stir-fried with beef and vegetables in soy — not red at all. The fiery gochujang version is usually traced to Seoul's Sindang-dong in the 1950s, where there's still a street of tteokbokki shops.
Now it's sold from steaming street stalls everywhere, eaten standing up with twigim (fritters), sundae (blood sausage) and a paper cup of the fish-cake broth.
How it varies
- Gungjung tteokbokki
- The royal original: soy, beef and vegetables.
- Rabokki
- With instant ramyeon noodles in the pot.
- Rosé tteokbokki
- A newer, creamier version with milk or cream.
Be the first here
Start your own tteokbokkiNo one here has made tteokbokki yet. Start it as v1, and every version after is an experiment the next cook can learn from.
Near it
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KoreanKimchiNapa cabbage salted, then rubbed with a paste of chilli flakes, garlic, ginger and salted seafood, and left to ferment.No one here has made it yet