This past week, I decided to take on a really big challenge--cooking. It is a tradition when it gets colder out to cook certain foods in Korea, and one of them is a dessert called hoddok (spelled 호떡 in Korean). It’s essentially a fried pancake with brown sugar filling inside and is a classic street food in Korea and is apparently very easy to find and easy to make. I was encouraged by the seemingly simple steps to make the dessert and thought I would use this as a jumping off point for cooking Korean food. I invited a couple friends over to help make and eat the dessert, and I used a box mix that I found at this Korean marketplace and restaurant called New Grand Market.
This is the mix that I used. It had simple instructions on the back in both English and Korean, and since I was cooking a Korean dish I tried to read the instructions in Korean. I found that there were many words that I had never seen before, and ended up having to go back and forth between the English and Korean instructions to understand what the instructions meant. Not being able to even get through simple step by step instructions for cooking made me realize just how small of an area my Korean language skills extended into. I followed the instructions on the back and tried to struggle through what should have been (at least I think) a really easy process.
Step one: mix the pancake mix with water and yeast and mix the batter for around 5-10 minutes continuously. Step two: put rub vegetable oil on hands to prevent the dough from sticking and roll into a small ball. Then, it said to put the brown sugar mix inside the flattened dough ball and carefully wrap the surrounding dough on top of the brown sugar (to create a kind of dumpling shape. I had to look at the English instructions side for the translation of the Korean word for vegetable oil. The direct translation would have been 야채 기름 (yachae gireum) which is literally 야채/vegetable and 기름/oil but instead was 식용유 (shik yong yoo) and I was really surprised at how completely wrong my guess was. Apparently, the yoo in shik yong yoo is the chinese character for oil and is often used instead of the colloquial word gireum. I was surprised to see how integrated Chinese characters still were in Korean language even in modern day. Step three: place the dough on the pan and fry them until the bottom while golden brown and then to press down on the ball gently to create the pancake shape. It then said to flip a couple more times and the pancake would be complete. Overall, this experience was challenging for both my cooking skills and my grasp of Korean. I realized that a lot of words that would be commonplace, everyday language in Korea were completely foreign to me and I might not have realized this without trying to do something completely new like this.
Comments
Thanks for sharing your cooking experience with us and it is so interesting! I like Korean food so much but never have a chance to do them at home. I like 호떡 very much and taste so good. Next time I will try to do the 호떡 by following your recipe.
I love making and eating hodduk at home! I used to make it all the time with my mom. I like how it's pretty easy to make yet so tasty. I sometimes actually burn my tongue or skin with the hot filling but it's worth it in the end. I'm sad I wasnt able to be there to make it with you guys, I think I was studying that day. It's also the best snack on the streets of Korea in the winter because of how it warms you up and gives you a little boost of energy. I think the best one I've had is in the hanok village in Seoul.
It looks so fun and challenging at the same time! Cooking and reading Korean is never easy for me either, but I like trying them. I'm so glad you tried it! The 호떡 looks really tasty in the pic. Also, I've found that a lot of words in Korean having similar pronunciation with the words in Chinese as well, which made my learning experience a little bit easier. But it still usually takes me a while to remember the exact pronunciation.
It’s good that you decided to challenge yourself by trying to improve your Korean language and cooking skills! I know what it’s like to study a language for a while, and then encounter words that I’ve never seen before. Food is a unique topic, so it makes sense that you can study a language for a while and not know many food-related words.
Wow! This looks really tasty. I have tried this before with my family and it is really good and sweet. I really like this cultural post and I like how to incorporated Korean words and phrases into it as well. The instructions were really cut and clear with helpful pictures and fun facts. I didn’t know that there was a tradition to cook certain foods when it got cold outside!