Savor sweet Korean hotteok: A taste of street food delight
This is a delicacy that Koreans enjoy both at home and out on the town. Yeast pancakes with filling are one of the symbols of this country's street food cuisine.
Hotteok is a Korean pancake with filling. It is most commonly made from yeast dough with the addition of glutinous rice flour. This ensures that the fried pancakes are crispy on the outside and chewy and soft on the inside. In the past, they were made with a meat filling, but Koreans later opted for a sweet filling of brown sugar, cinnamon, and chopped nuts.
Korean hotteok
Although there's nothing wrong with apple fritters, sometimes it's worth trying something new and tasty. You might think that since this is a Korean recipe, the ingredients will be complicated and hard to find. In reality, you don't have to search far and wide because everything can be found in a supermarket. You can easily skip the glutinous rice flour mentioned earlier.
Yeast dough tastes best with a sweet, nutty filling. Add a glass of milk or your favorite coffee, and you’ll feel as if you've visited a Korean grandmother or strolled through an Asian market.
Ingredients:
- 11 oz of all-purpose flour,
- 5 oz of milk,
- 2.5 oz of water,
- 0.7 oz of fresh yeast,
- 1 teaspoon of sugar,
- a pinch of salt,
- oil for frying.
Filling:
- 9 oz of walnuts,
- 3 tablespoons of brown sugar,
- 1 teaspoon of cinnamon.
Instructions:
- Crumble the yeast into a bowl, add sugar, and mix thoroughly.
- Add warm milk and water, then mix.
- Add flour and a pinch of salt, and knead the dough until it's thoroughly mixed.
- Cover with a cloth and let it rise for an hour.
- Chop the walnuts and mix them with sugar and cinnamon.
- Knead the risen dough briefly to remove the air.
- Divide into about 8 pieces and shape each into a ball.
- Flatten the balls with a rolling pin or by hand.
- Add a generous amount of filling and seal like a dumpling.
- Flatten again to form a round pancake.
- Heat the oil in a pan and add the prepared pancakes.
- Fry on medium heat for 1-2 minutes on each side until they are golden brown. During frying, use a spatula to flatten them.
Serve the hotteok straight from the pan while hot. Enjoy!
