Hello, listeners and happy Seollal or Lunar New Years Day! So today lets talk about a Seollal specialty food.
But first let me teach you a little secret in Korea. It is the secret to eternal youth in Korea. It’s quite a simple thing, but you need to have self control. You feel me?
Ok, so if you want to stay young in Korea and never get a year older then you should never eat a delicious bowl of tteokguk.
That's it. That's all you have to do.
It’s actually quite tough to do though because the beef broth dish filled with silky and chewy rice cake disks is hard to resist.
Koreans believe that if you eat this dish that you will become a year older. They also believe that by eating it that you’ll gain good health and fortune in the new year. So…there’s the rub.
You can choose to be young and poor or a year older and fortunate. I suggest you choose the latter for not only do you get a delicious meal, but also a blessing for the new year.
The most important ingredient of this dish is garaetteok which is a long, cylindrical rice cake that is sliced into oval disks that resemble coins. The garaetteok is labor-intensive to make for steamed rice needs to be pounded until it is smoothed and then it is rolled into cylinders. After the rice cake is made, you could roast it and eat it right away, but in order to make the “rice cake coins” it needs to cool and harden before it can be made. With all the effort and waiting, eternal youth might not be worth it.
After the garaetteok is made, the soup, tteokguk, is made by making a clean tasting yet savory beef broth from beef, onions, garlic and kelp. After the broth is complete the vegetables are removed from the broth and the beef is shredded. To garnish, egg whites and yolks are separated and then panfried. The cooked white and yellow parts of the egg are sliced very thin and green onions are sliced. You can also add some shredded kim, or roasted seaweed. The rice cakes are cooked in the broth till soft and the dish is served by adding some shredded beef, shredded egg yolks and whites, green onions, and seaweed.
I love the chewy rice cakes in the dish and the broth is soothing and nourishing.
For an upgraded version of this, you can add some mandu or Korean-style dumplings. At my household, our family likes to make the dumplings together the day before. We prepare enough for the new years but then the extra are frozen for a special day in the future.