Korean Savory Rice Cakes

As most of you know I taught English in South Korea for 3 years, and met my husband over there.  Living in the US is great but we both really miss the food.  Tonight I surprised him with a little taste of home.  I made him tteokbokki a popular Korean street food.  I decided to go all out and make the ddeok (rice cakes) from scratch.

Ddeok in Korean

I have to say I am very proud with how well the rice cakes turned out.  I can't wait to try the sweet version some time this week!

To make these yummy rice cakes, this is what you will need:

1 1/2 cup rice flour (not sweet rice flour)
1/2 tsp salt (you may want to reduce this just a bit I am still toying with the measurments)
3/4 cup water

Add the rice flour, salt and water into a bowl and mix till combined. The mixture should be sticky but not smooth... it will look like large cheese curds (sort of).

cheese curd-ish looking mixture

Once the mixture is combined you will steam it for about 30 min.  You can use whatever kind of steamer you have.  I have a bamboo one which normally I would line with cheese cloth...but I was fresh out so wet paper towels had to do instead.

Remove the rice cake from the steamer after 30 min, either place in a bowl to kneed by hand or if you are lucky throw it in your bread machine.  I am not lucky so I had to kneed it by hand.  Be careful, the mixture is really hot.  I wore kitchen gloves to kneed the whole thing until it cooled down enough to hold with my bare hands.  You need to kneed the dough for quite some time about 20min or so.  The dough should be smooth with no lumps.

Smooth dough with no lumps

Next you get to have a lot of fun and play with the dough like it's play-dough.  All those years of making play-dough snakes will finally come in handy.  Take a chunk off your dough ball and role it into a snake about the width of your thumb.  

Finally cut your snake into 1 inch pieces, or into whatever size rice cake you want.  

Now you are ready to make lots of different delicious foods with your ddeok like tteokbokki!

I will post a recipe for tteokbokkie later, I am still refining it, but here are some pictures to tide you over until then ^^  

The finished product

Onion, hard boiled eggs, and green onions (missing fish paste and cabbage)

This is most of whats in the sauce

Simmering

Everyone is in the pan

Mmmmm enjoy!