Tteokbokki or stir-fried rice cakes are popular Korean street food; sold either in pojangmacha (street stalls). Spotting tteokbokki while on a crowded street isn’t that hard – the red, and soupy treat stands out from the rest of the stuff sold along the streets of Korea.
The Korean dish is made from garatteok, or the long, cylindrical rice cakes that you can buy in Asian groceries. You may use a broth made from boiled anchovies, but you can also use water if you don’t have it at your disposal. Then there’s the gochujang, mainly responsible for the delicious orange-red color of the tteokbokki. You also put in eomuk, or the Korean fish cakes which are flat and brown and which you might know as oden and hardboiled eggs. Of course, there’s the cabbage, the scallions and the sesame seeds as garnishes and additional texture.
There are several other varieties of tteokbokki that has prefixes to its name but recently, perhaps the most famous of these varieties is the cheese tteokbokki and as the name suggests, you just put cheese on top of this very hot, steaming and chewy snack and wait until it melts. Ahhhh, the goodness.
*photo source: https://blog.naver.com/minimize_j/220705630610
