Tteokbokki-ng Our Way Through Life
The biggest struggle of being a vegetarian is the lack of variety. We bring to you the trending Korean dish, which surprisingly, is vegetarian! Say bye to boring noodles and try this saucy, spicy delicacy!
Ever since K-pop gained the limelight, everything about Korea from K-dramas to Korean food has managed to insert itself into our daily lives. If we name even one K-drama here, we are confident that half of our readers will recognize it. Korean cuisine has gained almost instant popularity globally. Just like the talented K-pop idols. The reason behind Korean dishes gaining popularity is the addicting taste of spices and sauces. The cuisine consists of a huge variety of meats and seafood, along with a wide variety of noodles. It gets its delicious flavor from spices and fermented sauces; the most used condiment is Gochujang. Gochujang is a paste made from red-chili pepper flakes, fermented soybeans, salt, and sticky rice. It is thick and sweet-spicy and is a crucial part of the cuisine. Koreans take their Gochujang very seriously, as it is fermented for years in earthenware pots called jangdok that are kept outside. Gochujang is the main flavoring agent in tteokbokki.
To make this tasty vegetarian dish, you need tteokmyeon. These are rice cakes and are cylindrically shaped. These can be long or short. The rice cakes are boiled with water until chewy and seasoned with either spicy gochujang or non-spicy ganjang. The spicy gochujang flavored tteokbokki is more commonly eaten. Tteokbokki is a popular Korean street food and is more commonly found at bunsikjip or snack bars and pojangmacha or street stalls. Although it started out as a street snack, there are now dedicated restaurants for tteokbokki as well. It is very commonly made in households as well since rice cakes are very easily available everywhere.
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Coming to the tteokbokki, there are a lot of variations in its preparation; curry-tteokbokki, rose-tteokbokki, jajang-tteokbokki, and so on. There are even non-vegetarian versions, it all depends on what your taste is. There are a variety of toppings that you can also include in your bowl of tteokbokki- fish cakes, jammy eggs, hard-boiled eggs, scallions. You can even include ramyeon noodles and make a dish called Rabokki (ramen + tteokbokki).
Red-hot and saucy, need we say more? Your favorite K-drama characters are all eating this popular street-food. Why aren’t you?
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