Recipe: Gwangju Tteokgalbi

Posted by Tammy in Featured, Korean Food 101, Korean Recipes, Recipes | 3 comments

Gwangju tteokgalbi doesn't have any rice cake. Its small profile makes it child-friendly and easy to pick up with chopsticks. (Tammy Quackenbush photos)

Many consider Seoul, the capital of Korea for more than 600 years, to be the culinary hub of Korea. However, South Korea’s sixth-largest city, Gwangju, also has ample cuisine cred.

Located in the middle of Jeolla-nam province near the southwestern tip of the Korean peninsula, Gwangju has a 2,000-year history traced to the Three Kingdom period. More recently, the city become internationally known due to events of May 18, 1980, known as the Gwangju Democratization Movement.

While Americans in the Pacific Northwest were fleeing the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, hundreds, even thousands of South Koreans half a world away were standing up to a military dictatorship. The government response was swift and brutal. Korean special forces soldiers shot unarmed civilians with automatic weapons. The people of Gwangju fought back, but the bad guys won — for a while.

Gwangju is also known for a dish called 떡갈비 tteokgalbi (Korean “hamburger” beef patties). There’s an entire street of restaurants dedicated to this fun, easy dish. Don’t let the name fool you, there’s no 떡 tteok (rice cake) in this recipe. And the dish isn’t the similarly sounding 닭갈비 dakgalbi, a spicy chicken dish that’s a specialty of Chuncheon.

Tteokgalbi is low-carb and kid-friendly.

Gwangju tteokgalbi

Patties

1 small onion, diced

¹/₄ cup pear (European or Asian), mince

1 carrot, grated

3 green onions, finely diced

1 tablespoon garlic, minced

1 teaspoon ginger, minced

1 pound ground beef, preferably from the ribs (or ¹/₂ pound beef, ¹/₂ pound pork)

Patty marinade

¹/₄ cup soy sauce

1¹/₂ tablespoon sugar

2 tablespoon honey

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1 tablespoon soju

¹/₂ teaspoon black pepper

1 tablespoon mirin

1. Put the first four ingredients (onion, pear, carrot and green onion) in a food processor and grind them to a paste. Mix the paste, minced garlic and minced ginger with the ground beef.
2. In a separate bowl, combine all the marinade ingredients, and mix half of it with the ground beef.
3. Once the marinade is mixed into the beef, allow the mixture to sit and mingle, covered in your refrigerator for 30 minutes.
4. Form the mixture into golf ball-sized portions, and shape them into square or sausage shapes (like tteok).
5. Pour 1 tablespoon of grapeseed or other high-temperature oil into a skillet. Fry the tteokgalbi on medium heat until they are completely cooked. Brush the reserved marinade on the tteokgalbi as it cooks.

You can stick the patties into pita pockets with a little ssamjang-spiked mayo and kimchi for a fusion sandwich treat, or eat them Korean-style with rice, lettuce and side dishes.

Tammy Quackenbush (Writer/San Francisco Bureau Chief) lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her love of Korean food started when she taught ESL in Chuncheon, Gangwon-do, back in 1996-1997. However, she didn’t become “famous” for her Korean cooking style until she started making cooking videos on YouTube as Koreanfornian Cooking in 2007 (had to put her college degree to use somehow). Her recipes and articles have been featured in Plate Magazine and on Slice/Seriouseats.com, Foodbuzz, New Asian Cuisine, MarxFoods.com, Korea.net and iFoodTV.com. She has her own online presence at http://koreanforniancooking.com/.

Tammy

View all posts by Tammy
Tammys website

Incoming search terms:

• tteok recipe
• ddeok galbi recipe
• Bizarre Foods Seoul South Korea
• tteokgalbi
• korean tteok recipe
• SOUTH koreas food
• korean specialty recipes
• korean pop rice cake homemade recipes
• gwangju south korea
• korean teokk recipe