KC 251 – Tteokbokki (Spicy Rice Cakes)

Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe! Today’s the last post of the year, and I’m your Yuletide Yodelling Yokel, Jon O’Guin. Today’s dish HAD to be put up before the end of the year, despite the MANY complications, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute, but if you want to skip straight to the recipe, here’s a link. Everyone else, let’s dig in.

The Confusing Quests I Must Conquer

So, the REASON I had to have this up before the end of the year is very simple: commercial interest. See, the top tier of our Patreon allows a patron to request one dish every six months. So I HAD to get this done and out before the end of the year, or technically, I’d be violating our written contract. Which may not sound like a lot of problems to you, but when you’re as deeply involved with lawyers and Voudoun as I am, that sort of mistake can be quite costly.

Carefully worded contracts with either is the key to success.

The frustrating thing about this process has been how the madness of 2020, and my schedule in particular, pushed me to this weird state. See, as I admitted in the first post, right now, the only Patron at that tier is my mother. And, as I have also told you, getting her to agree to a dinner RIGHT NOW is practically impossible, let alone “hey, I legally owe you a dinner of your choice in the next six months, what do you want it to be?” Her direct response was “Anything from this show”, referring to a 12 episode Korean cooking show that is only available on a Streaming service FOR ASIAN SHOWS. So I quickly skimmed over some episode summaries and said “I see that one has tteokbokki, would that be fine?” And she said “yeah, sure.” So I went with it.

Or rather, I completely ignored the actual brief, and made today’s dish instead, because I accidentally did a mildly racist and ignorant thing. To explain that mistake fully, we have to explain what we’re making: Tteokbokki is a classic Korean dish, consisting of rice cakes cooked in a spicy-sweet* sauce. The way I explain it to people is “the traditional Korean equivalent of Mac and Cheese”: a pretty simple dish, made with very common and cheap ingredients that EVERYONE’s family makes. This comparison has gotten a little weirder in more modern times, because Korean actually has a lot of dishes with cheese, including tteokbokki. You may have noted that asterisk when talking about the sauce. That’s because while people would almost always think of that as the first version of the dish to come to mind, technically, the name doesn’t require it: tteok means “rice cakes”, and “bokki” means stir-fried. Tteokbokki can be made with curry sauce, cream sauce, topped with seafood or beef, and even has one old-school variant called gunjung tteokbokki, where the rice cakes are cooked not in the spicy-sweet gochujang-based sauce that’s most common, but a more savory-nutty sauce whose backbone is soy sauce and sesame/pine nuts, depending how bougie you are.

Guess which version they make in the show. Guess which CLEARLY MARKED version they make.

Fifteen SECONDS of research would have told me I was fucking up.

In fact, that’s technically the ORIGINAL tteokbokki recipe (and this is as good a place as any to note it, but there are A LOT of acceptable spellings of this dish’s name: dukbokki, topokki, tteok-bokki, etc) , since, you know, chile peppers such as the kind needed to make gochujang are a NEW WORLD crop. It was basically a variant of japchae (a stir-fried dish of translucent “glass” noodles) with chunky rice cakes instead of noodles. Like serving gnocchi alfredo instead of fettucine. The spicy version is one of the MILLION Asian dishes supposedly first invented by accident, when a Korean chef at a Chinese restaurant in the early 1950’s dropped some tteok into hot sauce, and went “you know what? This is pretty good.”

What I did was, essentially, go “Oh a recipe for (WORD I DON’T KNOW) Chicken Soup, I can make that” and then went off without ever checking what that word meant. I could be making chicken noodle soup, blissfully unaware the RECIPE is for “Chicken and Wild Rice” or “Chicken and Dumpling”, “Chicken Curry” or any of a thousand other soup possibilities.

Are there a thousand types of soup? There’s gotta be at least a couple hundred. At least 100 chicken-based ones. Gotta be.

Hell, the dish could have been titled “Vegan “chicken” soup”, and I’d have plowed on ahead blithely tossing meat around left and right. It’s a bad look, and bad form on my part…but luckily I’m also not totally unhappy I did it. I should have put in the effort to actually learn the recipe I was going to try to emulate, but, once I learned it, I probably would have negotiated to making the version I DID make instead, because, as I mentioned, it’s the most popular version, so it’s most likely the one you’re going to encounter. Like, the original Macaroni and Cheese recipe is closer to like, a meat-less lasagna, with sheets of pasta. But no one would ASSUME that’s what I was going to make if I said “Mac and Cheese”. Is gunjung tteokbokki delicious?  Quite possibly. Hell, the version made IN the show is deliberately made to make the dish more accessible to Western palates, adding broccoli to the standard beef to make it more like Chinese American dishes you might be familiar with, adding more honey and garlic to the soy-sesame sauce, and mixing pasta in with the tteok, so I’m sure it would be both delicious AND more familiar..

But for me, I’ve spent well over a year at this point hearing about tteokbokki, and seeing it in shows, books, and other media, and I wanted to understand the classic…well, ‘typical’ approach. So even though I stumbled into it by accident, I’m happy I ended up making this version.

Especially because I almost went in without knowing jack shit about the version I WAS making, anyway.

As a white dude, I know a thing or two about blindly charging into unknown territory and succeeding despite idiocy. And then later being removed from power because of villainy.

It turns out there’s not actually a lot of options for Korean food around my small town in America, that weren’t like, an hour and some change away. And man, was it not fun trying to pitch “Let’s go get some Korean food” or “let’s order it delivered to our house”, a process I performed DOZENS of times, to be met with varying rejections, which in classic O’Guin fashion, we cloaked in polite phrases that, if critically inspected for a second, fell apart. Answers like

- “I don’t want delivery” (So instead you and your brother should go pick up fast-food)

-“That’ll take too long” ( When the timeline for delivery was 40 minutes, and we ended up instead taking options that took…35 minutes)

or

-‘I don’t know if that’s the best call right now, since Mom has to go to work in the morning (a semi-valid point…if my mother ever STOPPED going into work, since she was criticized by her boss for violating the “don’t work more than 13 days in a row” guideline on multiple occasions (in her defense, she technically had to work due to a catch-22 of her work places requiring a certain number of supervisors…and there not being enough assigned under her. For a huge simplification, imagine if a military base required a “commissioned officer” overseeing gate-duty…and the base kept one Major in charge of the operation, and kept rotating 2nd lieutenants under them on a biweekly basis. There’s one person grossly over-qualified, and a sea of people UNDER-qualified, and you end up with the major constantly on gate duty)

To further exasperate me, in the time frame of me trying to convince them to ORDER DELIVERY, we went on FOUR road-trips to eat/get food more than an hour away from our house.

Eventually, and by that I mean “IN BETWEEN steps of cooking the dish”, I gave up trying to include them, and just ordered it, which is how I ended up tasting my first tteokbokki, 24ish days ago, in the middle of an ongoing disaster which would only get worse. We’ll touch on that in a second, but first, the tteok:

Tik-tteok on the clock
I been blowin’ speakers up
tonight
Gonna bite

The tubes there are the tteok themselves, about 2” long little tubes with a bit of what would be called “Q texture”, or “pleasant chewiness”. The best comparison I can think of is “a soft, dry, tootsie roll”. Like, your first bite in doesn’t go ALL the way through, but your second does. The parallelogram there is a little sheet of Eomuk, or fish cakes. There’s some chopped scallions, minced garlic…the most interesting thing to me is that these spicy rice cakes…aren’t all that spicy. There’s the flavor of chiles, and garlic, but we’re talking a 1.5 out of 5 stars at a Thai place. We’re talking “a recipe for spaghetti sauce you don’t worry about feeding to your grandmother”, We’re talking “a tablespoon of sriracha stirred into a bowl of tomato soup.”

This was impressively frustrating, given how deeply into disaster I was at this point. And to explain why, I’ve got to rewind time, and talk about putting too much on your plate.

My Eyes Are Bigger Than My Stomach

The first thing to understand is that I was worried that this recipe was going to be too simple. A classic tteokbokki recipe basically consists of “get some garlic, gochujang, gochugaru (I’ll explain in a bit), soy sauce, broth, and sugar, then cook some rice cakes and veggies in it.” And it’s not even complicated! The steps are “Dump all the ingredients of the sauce together, stir to dissolve, bring to a boil. Add rice cakes, cook for a bit, and then add veggies. Cook until done.” In terms of COMPLEXITY, we’re basically dealing with Instant Ramen: add seasoning to water, heat, add noodles, cook.

This picture would have been better, but I didn’t try harder. THAT’S how low-effort we’re dealing with: “I’m not going to turn on a light”

So I came up with a “plan”, which is in quotes because, it didn’t really have STEPS, just a core idea: make the tteok as well. The recipe I’m reading suggest that making the cakes isn’t HARD, it’s just a little finicky and takes a couple hours. And no one can complain about “here’s a simple sauce for rice cakes, and a recipe for hand-made rice cakes!”

So, this is all occurring around the end of November, start of December. I’m trying to churn out recipes so that I can spend the weeks in Leavenworth just working and hanging out. And the timeline is a real drag: Nate likes to eat around 6 PM. I don’t like working in the kitchen while he’s working or my mom is watching her shows, the former of which goes until about 4:30ish every weekday, and the latter of which is basically “any time between noon and 8 PM”. I’m also struggling, because, as I pointed out with the Mochi post and the follow-up about Rice flour, technically I’m supposed to be using a VERY SPECIFIC type of rice flour, which is NOT sold near me. So my options are: “hand soak and grind rice into flour, which supposedly only works with a variety of RICE you don’t have…or believe these Korean authors who tell you it can be done with normal rice flour and a little extra effort”. I take option B. AND THEN stack another burden on myself.

I discovered that there’s a contest going on in Korea, where the foreigner who makes the best Kimchi recipe video could win up to $5,000. That would REALLY help with validating the work I do for the site, and could help cover expanding/streamlining the operation. The downside is…I mean, my professional skill-set is professional theatre, then a semi-professional cook and food historian. I am NOT a camera man, or film editor, and this video is due by like, Sunday. Which is why I was actually almost certainly already screwed: Most film editors suggest that, for a 20 minute video, you’re going to want between 15-25 hours to edit and process it. So if I really wanted to try and pull it off, I would have needed to do like, filming on Monday/Tuesday, and editing the rest of the week, instead of DISCOVERING the contest on Tuesday. Which doesn’t matter, because by this point, I was in what I would call “A fey mood”: I was churning out recipes, having panic attacks, and generally beyond the mental point where I could coolly analyze that this was no time to try and essentially START A NEW CAREER in order to get ONE entry into a digital contest.  

I am going to be a LEGENDARY cakecrafter, or I’m going to go insane and beat up 25 people.

So I actually tried to shoot around 20 minutes of me making the rice cakes on my phone, with Nate in the other room. And things went BAD. Like, right now, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to extract photos from the videos I shot, but here’s a walk-through on how it went: I poured the hot water into the rice flour, which is supposed to make a kind of clumpy, but still flour-y dough. Mine was goo.

On review, maybe it’s a good thing the video thing didn’t work out. White balancing this would have been a MESS.

At this point, the flour is supposed to be moved to a steamer, and cooked for 30 minutes or something, which is supposed to make it really HOT, but generally just incorporate more water into the flour. MINE cooked into a single, solid mass.

It’s not often one’s dough “thumps” into the mixer.

THEN, the flour is supposed to be kneaded together with a bread machine, so I had to pull out a 28-year-old machine from the hall closet, clean it, and try using it to “kneed” my chunk of cooked dough into a stretchy dough, with mixed success: it DID breakdown the chunk and beat it together…but somehow it revealed/created hundreds of little pockets of uncooked rice flour, producing a craggly dough studded with little bumps. I gamely tried kneading it and rolling it out, and then said “Fuck this. I’m not putting this on YouTube, so the video idea is dead. And I don’t want to try and cook this. Nate has mandated that we have to take what feels like our fucking bimonthly trip to Finnriver tomorrow, the internet says Central Market has tteok, I’m just going to buy some, maybe talk about how bad this process went, and that’ll be the post. And you know what? If that little asshole can insist that we spend one of my last days in town going to HIS happy place, fuck him, I’m going to order the delivery tonight and fucking actually TRY the recipe before trying to cook it.”  

I mentioned this wasn’t a great headspace, but it’s where I was when I ordered the delivery, tried it, went to bed, and then had a pleasant day at Finnriver, since despite the apparent vitriol in that little spiel, I do enjoy my time at Finnriver, I just…get very frustrated at what feels like a grossly uneven power-balance between our desires: In 6 months, we went to Finnriver (a 1 hour drive one-way) 3 times, because it is, as noted, “Nate’s Happy Place”. He has stated that, if he could, he would spend EVERY weekend there. And it’s not like I spend hours hemming and hawing about going: He says “I want to go to Finnriver this weekend” or “I talked about going to Finnriver this weeknd” and I say “cool”.  On the reverse, we went on ONE trip I wanted to go on in that same timeline, taking a marginally longer drive (1 hour 15 minutes) to try AWARD-WINNING mac-and-cheese (my mother’s ‘favorite food’) because Nate felt bad that I had actually believed that he or mom would go, when I suggested it and they both expressed nothing by positive reactions. And I’m slightly underselling the discrepancy: in that same timeframe, Nate and Mom went at LEAST twice without me, and I’m pretty sure it was actually 3 times: twice while I was in Leavenworth, and once while I was running Callbacks.

There’s a worrying amount of whining, but Jon’s still in a funky headspace. Just…accept that things were going bad enough for him to hate his entire life.

Was any of that relevant? No, but reliving this recipe is tearing open wounds, and something-something auld acquaintance/purging of bad emotions before the new year. Humorously (if you find human suffering humorous, as so many on the internet do)  it turns out that between me checking on Friday, and me getting there Saturday, Central Market sold out of the rice cakes. So my only option was to cook my craggly bad-boys.

Choking down tears, I had to face the music. Let’s get cooking.

I Gochu Now, Star Fox

Now, I’m going to come right out and say it: I don’t know if this recipe is legit, or ‘works’ by the standards of normal Korean cuisine. I made a choice in ignorance, and decided to stick by it. As I noted, the video contest was for people cooking with Kimchi, and the first like, FIVE tteokbokki recipes I checked did NOT include kimchi. I found others that did, so I decided to stick with it, but for all I know, this is a weird move akin to mixing coleslaw with your mac and cheese. I WILL say that I had a vague reason to do so. See, for a traditional tteokbokki, you should use, according to almost every source I could fine, an anchovy broth made using kombu and dried anchovies. And since I couldn’t find any pre-made broth, nor did I want to simmer dried fish, I decided to instead use water, which is the suggested other option. (Nate and I joked that it was a little weird to not suggest like, pre-made dashi, or vegetable broth, or fish stock, but I accepted it as just part of the recipe.) BUT, I figured the funky fish-paste in the spicy kimchi I was using could return some of the fishiness and umami notes, AND the recipe I was using called for cabbage, so I figured using Cabbage kimchi would let me kill two birds with one stone.

Kimchi is well-known for its bird-killing qualities.
Actually, thinking about it, I have no idea if birds can eat kimchi. On the one hand, birds are, generally, fairly resistant to spicy peppers. On the other hand, garlic, which is often used, is toxic to many birds, and who knows how various fish pastes work.

So I mixed together gochujang (the Korean Chile paste I keep saying you should all have in your fridge because it tastes delicious, keeps forever, and since it’s soybean-based, it’s a dish I now have to be careful about to avoid too many oxalates for cruel irony) and gochugaru, which are Korean red chili pepper flakes.

While this kind of name would normally be a joke in the West, like “it’s just as hot as your mother-in-law’s criticisms” or something, in Korea, it’s traditional for a new wife to be taught the family secrets for their version of various dishes. There’s no joke here, because I am already a smart enough man to know not to piss off mothers-in-law.

The recipe I was using says that you can use between 1 and 3 tsps depending on how much of a kick you want, and I will tell you now, I would start at 2. That’s what I used, and I would not call the resulting dish “spicy”, but I would say it had a little bit of heat. Mix with some sugar and corn syrup (which will dissolve a little easier/give a different texture, you can just use sugar if you don’t want to get complicated), and some minced garlic and soy sauce.

Bubble, bubble…look, just bubble
Rice cakes soon will be in trouble.

Bring it to a boil, and toss in the craggly rice cakes of failure (or just buy good rice cakes) to boil for 10 minutes. Add the vegetables (in our case, the kimchi and some chopped scallions), boil another 5ish minutes, or until you’re happy with how thick the sauce is, and Boom, you’re done.

It’s hot, hot (say what) sticky sweet.
From my cakes, to kimchi.

It tastes…not EXACTLY like the previous night’s batch, but close enough. It’s warm, with just a bit of heat at the back of your throat, and surprisingly sweet. The rice cakes aren’t quite right, texturally, being a little drier, but they’re pretty close, and surprising smooth to eat given their visual messiness. I was pleasantly surprised to call what had felt like a complete mess a success, and I’d honestly suggest you try the recipe out yourselves when not losing your mind, and just buying your own rice cakes. I am personally VERY intrigued at the idea of a version of this with Cheese melted in it, and will probably try to hunt that down sometime in January.

But for now, that’s the last post for 2020. I’m going to spend the next couple days unpacking, planning, and maybe cooking up something quick to start 2021 off (I have ONE recipe pre-cooked, but I don’t know if I want to do it the 4th…we’ll see, I just thought of one connection.) I wish you all a Happy New Year, I hope your holidays have been happy, safe, and comforting, and let’s get cracking for the next year.

MONDAY: IT COULD BE ANYTHING, BUT IT COULD BE CHURROS A LITTLE MORE THAN MOST.

Time for the

Recipe

Tteokbokki

Serves 4

Ingredients

                Sauce

3.5 cups water or anchovy broth

3 tablespoons gochujang

1 - 3 teaspoons Korean red chili pepper flakes

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1-3 tablespoons sugar or corn syrup (I used 1 tbsp each)

1 tablespoon minced garlic

                Filling

1 pound store-bought rice cakes (To make your own rice cakes: Don’t.)

4 ounces spicy kimchi, chopped

2 scallions, chopped

Preparation

1. Combine all sauce ingredients in a large skillet or medium sauce-pan, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring to dissolve/incorporate all ingredients.

2. Add the rice cakes, and cook for 10 minutes, until tender, and sauce has reduced. Add kimchi and scallion, cook an additional 4-6 minutes until kimchi is tender, and sauce has further reduced.

3. Ladle into bowls and serve hot.