Korean hotteok: Street food delight you can make at home
This is a delicacy that Koreans enjoy both at home and 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 typically 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 exploring something new and delicious. You might think that since this is a Korean recipe, the ingredients will be complicated and hard to find. In reality, you don't need 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 favourite coffee, and you can feel as if you've visited a Korean grandmother or strolled through an Asian market.
Ingredients:
- 300 grams of plain flour,
- 150 millilitres of milk,
- 75 millilitres of water,
- 20 grams of fresh yeast,
- 1 teaspoon of sugar,
- a pinch of salt,
- oil for frying.
Filling:
- 250 grams 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, and mix.
- Add flour and a pinch of salt, then knead the dough thoroughly.
- 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 for a moment to remove the air.
- Divide into about eight 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!
