호떡 at Home

January 3, 2009 4:52 PM

KoreanFoodFilter: I'm hankering for hoddeok (호떡). Help me out!

In my recent trip to Seoul I fell in love with hoddeok, the filled pancakes served as street food throughout Seoul, hot off the griddle or deep fryer. Do you have a recipe for these that you're happy with? I've found one or two while searching online, but I don't know how accurate they are. Share you recipes and tips with me so that I can make these tasty morsels at home! For bonus points: are the hoddeok on the streets of Seoul made with wheat flour or rice flour?

posted by larsks to food & drink (7 comments total)

호떡 is essentially a yeast bread dough (made with wheat flour) with dark sugar filling. Think naan filled with sugar, cooked at a high enough heat to melt the sugar inside.

The recipe I use as a starting point - in the sense that I may adjust amounts a bit based on how the dough looks - goes like this:

mix 1 tablespoon yeast, 1/2 tablespoon sugar and 1/2 cup of lukewarm water.
let sit for 10 minutes

mix 3 cups of flour, 1 cup of milk, 1/2 tablespoon sugar and yeast mixture and let rise until doubled.

with oiled hands, take a piece of dough and roll into a ball, then flatten to a disk, sprinkle dark brown sugar (or other filling of your choice) in the middle, bring edges up so that filling is covered with dough, press and flatten again so filling is sealed in. then cook in heated well-oiled griddle or pan, flattening with a spatula. turn once.
posted by needled at 6:08 PM on January 3

My Korean Kitchen has very good authentic recipes. Hoddeok!
posted by cazoo at 6:10 PM on January 3 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'd say if you can get rice flour to use it. I mean, there's plenty of dough recipes out there without but all the good hoddeoks I've had have a chewiness to it that is definitely more "ddeok"-like thanks to rice flour (ddeok, obviously being the catchall term for rice cakes. Not what Americans think of rice cakes as in the cakes of puffed rice, but the mochi like stuff). I love "chapsal (rice flour) hodeok," so I could be biased.

Another important point is that Korean recipes (I don't know what English-based sites say) will usually ask for kangryuk-bun (strong flour), which is basically a high protein, high gluten flour (again for chewiness), so for best result, I'd say use bread flour rather than all-purpose. But YMMV on what level of chewiness you like.

For the dough you can find a lot of variations like one that asks for the Korean fermented rice alcohol makkuli in it (and I think that's a bit much, though I'm tempted to try that). One of my favorite "single, at home Korean cooking" blogger types has her version that calls for Korean cornbread mix. Now mind you, this is DIFFERENT FROM AMERICAN CORNBREAD. Basically she's using a Korean bread flour premix and adding yeast and stuff, so don't go buy a box of cornbread mix from the store and try this out. The reason I point her recipe is because though she doesn't have rice flour, she prefers overkneading the dough by stepping on it to make up the chewiness in lack of rice flour (if you do any baking, a lot of recipes will ask you not to overknead or else the dough will get too tough and chewy, so I find it pretty ingenious of her to use this baking "flaw" to get around the rice flour issue). So, if you wanna try her method using bread flour and overkneading it, let me know and I can translate what she does for you (And if you wanna use rice flour, I like the dough recipe from my first link, but I won't take up space translating it here, unless you want me to).

For the filling, I prefer Double P's recipe as a starting point because it recreates my favorite type of hoddeok fillings which are usually nuttier rather than just sugar and cinnamon, whether you add peanuts or sesame seeds:

- 4 tbsp of dark brown sugar
- 1/2 tbsp of brown sugar
- 6 diced chestnuts. (my personal note: though the recipe says chestnut, I think peanuts or even cashews might work better as a replacement if you can't find chestnuts out of the shell for snacking purposes. I've definitely had peanut in mine before.)
- 1/2 tbsp of toasted black sesame seeds
- 1/2 tbsp of toasted sesame seeds

If that seems like a laundry list of things to put in, again I'm just saying it's a good starting point. Even Double P says, "Besides the dark and regular brown sugar base, you can add everything else freestyle. I'm thinking it'd taste pretty good even with just the sugars and cinnamon, don't you think?"

I personally have tried just sugar and cinnamon, or sugar+cinnamon+regular toasted sesame seeds, sugar+cinnamon+peanuts (or some kind of diced nut I can't put my finger on). And most Korean sites will say adjust filling recipe to your taste because some people like it more sweet, some people aren't a fan of too much cinnamon, some people might really like a nuttier flavor.
posted by kkokkodalk at 6:55 PM on January 3

Oops, forgot to add "1 tsp cinnamon" to the above recipe, don't forget that.
posted by kkokkodalk at 7:14 PM on January 3

I was thinking of mentioning 찹쌀 호떡, but decided not to, because I prefer the purist version my mother used to make at home - yeast dough + only dark brown sugar for filling. Personally I don't like the mochi-type chewiness of a lot of 찹쌀 foodstuffs. 찹쌀 has its place, as I like mochi, but it can be a strange experience encountering that texture when you were expecting something else, say, like a yeast raised donut.

I'd suggest the OP start out with the most basic version, and then work on the variations kkokkodaik mentioned once they are comfortable with the most basic version.
posted by needled at 7:17 PM on January 3

Oh yea, nothing wrong with the basic, but I just really wanted to point out using bread flour over all purpose because Korean kangryuk bun flour is probably closer to bread flour rather than all purpose and probably overkneading it a bit to make the dough chewier.
posted by kkokkodalk at 7:27 PM on January 3

Mmmmm.

Hoddeok is made both with wheat and rice flour, but it's more commonly made with wheat flour. If you ate it as street food, I'd say the chances are about 50/50 that you ate either kind. I'm personally a fan of the super-chewy 찹쌀/glutinous rice hoddeok which is also very common -- replace about a fourth of the flour in the recipes above with glutinous rice powder.
posted by suedehead at 8:54 PM on January 3