Tag: Korean

Korean Pancakes – 's Korean Pancake Recipe – Italian Cuisine

First, prepare the dough: pour the milk into a bowl, and dissolve the sugar and yeast in it.
Then add the flour and then also the salt and knead for at least 10 minutes, until you get a soft but homogeneous dough.

Put the dough in a lightly greased bowl, cover with cling film and let it rise for about 3 hours in a warm place.

Meanwhile, prepare the filling, simply by combining the brown sugar with cinnamon, vanilla seeds and pine nuts in a bowl.

When the dough has at least doubled, take one loaf at a time (about 12 will have to come), mash it well, stuff it with a little filling, then close the dough again, trying to crush it a little, but without letting the stuffing.

Heat some oil in a non-stick pan, then start cooking the pancakes, trying to mash them a little with a spatula during cooking, so that they keep a slightly flattened shape.
Cook over medium-low heat until golden brown, then turn with the spatula and cook the second side as well.

Korean pancakes are ready, serve them right away, so that the filling does not solidify.

Hotteok: Korean street food pancakes – Italian Cuisine

Hotteok is one of the most popular Korean street food and consists of a sweet pancake served hot with a delicious stringy filling

You cannot take a trip in Korea without being tempted by one of the most famous e typical street food of the country, or the pancakes called hotteok (also called hoddeok or hodduk), particularly widespread in the city of Seoul and in general in the south of the country. These sweet and stuffed pancakes they are mainly sold in winter and can be bought on the street or cooked at home, as the preparation is not particularly complex. Let's then discover the characteristics and evolution of this special sweet snack for which Koreans are crazy.

A vendor cooks hotteok, a Korean sweet pancake, at a stall at the Seomun Market in Daegu, South Korea, on Saturday, Nov. 12, 2016. The disenchantment with President Park Geun-hye in her hometown of Daegu signals a wider shift in the nation's political landscape, where regional loyalties often hold greater sway among the electorate than policy platforms. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho / Bloomberg — Street food in Korea: hotteok.

How Korean sweet pancakes are made

The hotteoks, introduced to Korea by Chinese immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, are soft sweet pancakes, whose dough is made with a mix of flours, generally white flour and rice, milk or water, sugar and yeast. The original recipe provides that the dough is left to rise for several hours and that, before being cooked in a pan or on the plate, it is stuffed with a dark brown sugar filling, cinnamon and some ground nuts or seeds. The result is a thick pancake, from the outside slightly crunchy and a pleasantly juicy and stringy filling. Hotteoks cooked by street vendors are generally prepared on large plates and, once ready, folded in half and served inside paper cups, so as to avoid customers getting burned with boiling syrup. Koreans love to cook hotteoks even at home, following the traditional recipe or buying a ready-made mixture available on the market.

Characteristics and evolution of the hotteok

As often happens for street food, the traditional hotteok has also undergone several revisions and currently there are about fifty variants available. In the sweet version, pancakes can be prepared with a chocolate cream inside or with a typically Asian filling based on red beans. Even more recent and creative savory hotteok, with fillings of all kinds that go from vegetables to stringy cheese, up to those based on traditional Korean ingredients or dishes, such as those at kimchi (fermented vegetables with spices and seafood) and al bulgogi (a dish based on marinated and grilled beef). In some cases the white dough of the pancakes comes colored with Korean tea powder or with various aromas. Finally, there are also thicker variations that are fried, making them similar to our donuts, or cooked on the plate like waffles.

Korean rice cakes, colored mezzelune to savor in company – Italian Cuisine

Discovering a dessert that comes from far away, the Korean rice cakes, try our five combinations and if you do not have enough to create new ones, have fun

The songpyeon they are rice cakes that in Korea are prepared on the occasion of Thanksgiving Day, which coincides with the mid-autumn festival that is celebrated in many Asian countries. These small crescent-shaped cakes (tteok) are stuffed with sweet filling of sesame seeds, sugar and honey, while the dough is formed from frozen rice powder combined with different smoothies, juices or powders that give a natural color to the dough. Traditionally it was used a short grain rice that was soaked for a whole night and then rinsed before being ground into powder, now they sell on the market already the frozen rice powder, which is then mixed with boiling water and natural dyes and then once the cakes are stuffed they come steamed on a bed of pine needles.

Recipe

Ingredients
A 1 kg bag of frozen rice powder will suffice for 3 different colored doughs, 150 g of pine needles to be rinsed 2 or 3 times and to dry, ideas for different colored doughs, each variant produces about 20 rice cakes.

Base dough (white)
2 cups of frozen rice powder, thawed at room temperature, 5 tablespoons of boiling water.

Green dough
2 cups of frozen rice powder, defrosted at room temperature, 2 tablespoons of green tea powder or matcha tea, 6 tablespoons of boiling water.

Yellow dough
2 cups of frozen rice powder, defrosted at room temperature, 1/3 cup of steamed pumpkin pulp, 2 tablespoons of boiling water.

Purple dough
2 cups of frozen rice powder, defrosted at room temperature, 4 tablespoons of warm cranberry juice (1/2 cup of fresh or frozen blueberries, finely blended with 1/2 cup of water, filtered and heated).

Pink dough
2 cups of frozen rice powder, defrosted at room temperature, 4 tablespoons of raspberry juice (1/2 cup of fresh or frozen raspberries, finely blended with 1/2 cup of water, filtered and heated).

Filling
1/2 cup of toasted sesame seeds, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1 tablespoon of honey, 1 pinch of salt.

Method
Grind coarsely sesame seeds with a blender, add sugar, honey and a pinch of salt and mix everything together.
After thawing the rice powder, sieve it in a bowl. Divide it into three equal parts and prepare the ingredients to flavor and color the dough and add them to the rice powder, mixing them with a spoon.

Knead all right for at least 5 minutes, if the dough sticks to the hands or the bowl means that it is too wet then add more rice powder. If the dough breaks easily or is too hard and dry add a little bit of boiling water. Cover the dough with a plastic wrap or a damp cloth and leave to rest in the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes.

To assemble the sweets, take a small piece of dough to form a ball as big as a nut. Form a bowl inside the ball by pushing the thumb into the mixture and then pressing it outwards with both thumbs to make a fairly large bowl. Put 1/2 teaspoon of stuffing into the bowl and seal by pressing on the edges, modeling it like a half moon. Repeat the operation until the end of the dough and the sweet filling.

Take a steam pot, add a little water to boil, place a thin layer of pine needles or a damp kitchen cloth on the basket and heat the water over high heat. When it starts boiling, place the rice cakes on the drum without the pieces touching each other. Cover with a thin layer of pine needles and steam for about 20 minutes.

Prepare a large bowl of cold water and with the help of a perforated spoon remove the rice cakes from the basket. Leave them in cold water for a quick rinse, removing all pine needles. Transfer the rice cakes into a colander and then serve hot or at room temperature.