Key Points
- Tteok are Korean desserts made from steamed and pounded rice.
- The rice cakes have grown a following in Australia partly due to featuring in K-Drama series.
- They’re made mostly using natural ingredients, making for a vegan or gluten-free dessert option.
Changhyun Lee’s workday starts at 2am, seven days a week, at his Siroo rice cake café in West Ryde, Sydney.
He rises early to prepare the day’s key ingredients, including rice, red bean, soybean, mung bean, mugwort, pumpkin, chestnut, pine nut and dates.
Mr Lee has made chewy rice cakes, or tteok (pronounced "tuck" or "duck"), for nearly 30 years, and still uses the traditional recipes he learned from his father back in Korea.
However, to cater for local tastes, he explores different ingredients like cheeses and fresh fruits.
Changhyun Lee has made rice cakes for more than 30 years. Source: SBS / SBS Korean
"While baking bread can start from the first processed product, flour, the first step of making rice cakes is processing the raw ingredients, which means making rice flour from rice, so it takes a little longer than baking," Mr Lee told SBS Korean.
First, he soaks the rice in water for about seven hours, before grinding, pounding, shaping and mixing it with other ingredients, and then steaming or boiling it.
Rice cakes come in many varieties. Source: SBS / SBS Korean
‘Labour of love’
Siroo, which was started by Mr Lee and his barista wife Esther Ko in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, rolls out more than 60 types of tteok each morning.
Jenny Lee, Mr Lee’s daughter and the venue's manager, said tteok were a fit for Australia’s café culture.
“We thought, because [dad] knows how to make rice cakes and since my mum loves coffee, like she always has three to four coffees a day, she loves visiting cafes ... why don't we just sell rice cakes and coffee together?” Ms Lee said.
She said many young customers track down the café via social media in search of bingsu, a shaved ice dessert with various toppings.
"We sell bingsu, and there is a type of tteok, called injeolmi, in it. Many people think it's delicious, so starting from injeolmi, they become more familiar with tteok's texture," she said.
Injeolmi is a rice cake made with glutinous rice that’s generously covered in roasted soybean powder, and has a very nutty flavour.
Long history
Generally, tteok refers to Korean rice cakes made from steamed and pounded rice.
Siru, clay pots used to steam tteok, were discovered among Bronze Age relics, and most historians estimate that the rice cakes have a history that goes back more than 4,000 years.
In Korea, tteok are a must-have for birthdays, weddings, traditional holidays and other celebrations.
Recently, tteok’s popularity has spiked internationally, in line with the global viewership of Korean drama series, or K-Dramas.
Tteok are an essential part of tteokbokki, a dish in which rice cakes and fish cakes are covered with a sweet-spicy chili sauce called gochujang.
Popular South Korean street food, tteokbokki Source: Supplied / Flickr/Alpha avlxyz CC BY-SA 2.0
A tteokbokki kiss performed by the main couple in the 2019 drama Romance in a Bonus Book (acted by Lee Jong-suk and Lee Na-young) deepened some fans' curiosity about the classic Korean dish.
Typically, tteokbokki is made with long, cylinder-shaped, white rice cakes, known as garaetteok. A slightly thicker and sliced version tends to be used in tteokguk, Korea's signature Lunar New Year dish.
The rice cakes are soft and pliable, providing a gentle resistance when being chewed.
Mr Lee said tteok were polarising for non-Koreans due to their distinctive, chewy texture.
"People outside Korea often claim that tteok feels excessively sticky, making it stick to their teeth when they chew it. As a result, non-Koreans often find this texture unfamiliar," he said.
"However, with the growing popularity of Korean food, more people have started to try tteok and gradually become accustomed to its unique texture."
‘Healthy option’
Café manager Ms Lee said tteok was often welcomed by people looking for healthy food options.
"Starting from rice, tteok uses healthy ingredients like beans, and our efforts to use as small an amount of sugar as possible have been well-received by our customers, especially people with diabetes," she said.
Changhyun Lee and his daughter, Jenny Lee. Source: SBS / SBS Korean
"All colours come from foods. The green is mugwort; the pink is either strawberry or purple cactus; the purple is purple sweet potato," she said.
Mr Lee added that most tteok were vegan and gluten-free because they did not use flour.
"I can say 95 per cent of the tteok products are dairy-free too," he said.
East meets West
Sydney-based Elin Kim creates rice cakes that look like Western-style cakes.
She uses baekseolgi, white soft steamed rice cakes, as cake sheets and decorates them with different-coloured bean pastes instead of buttercream.
One of Elin Kim's rice cakes. Source: Supplied / Supplied
"At first, I wondered if Australians would like rice cakes, but I started the class as I thought making pretty flowers with bean pastes could attract people," she said.
Recently, Ms Kim ran a ‘Paint Your Own Korean Rice Cake’ workshop at the Korean Culture Centre Australia in Sydney.
Ji Hee Kim, the centre's director, said, "This workshop introduces the rice cake, a food loved by Koreans, in connection with our current exhibition 'WONDER: Wordless Picture Books by seven artists from South Korea'."
Elin Kim runs regular tteok-making classes. Source: Supplied / Supplied
During the workshop, participants decorated a white rice cake with different coloured bean pastes.
Ms Kim said one of the best features of rice cakes was that they required only simple ingredients.
"All you need to make baekseogi is sugar, water and rice flour, just three ingredients. You can use any filling. It's fun to make, and especially for children, it can be great texture play," she said.
Local tastes
Australian sisters, Chantal and Tiffany Lanzing, said their curiosity about tteok prompted them to join the workshop.
"I really like the tteok, which is (a) chewy and squishy kind of tteok. So (it's the) kind you would find in tteokbokki and tteokkochi (rice cake stick). So, interestingly, I actually thought that today's cake might be made of a similar texture, but obviously I learned something new in that there are different types of tteok with different textures," Ms Chantal Lanzing said.
Chantal Lanzing joins the ‘Paint Your Own Korean Rice Cake’ workshop. Source: SBS / Justin Park/SBS Korean
"Rice cakes are foods that we eat when we celebrate something in Korea, and that's why I think it's good if we can laugh together and eat rice cakes together today," she said.
Mr Sultana said, for him, eating rice cakes carried less guilt than eating other desserts.
"My impression is that the Korean cake, made from rice cake, seems to be a lot healthier [than Western cakes]. It doesn't have any cream; it doesn't have any icing. It doesn't have any rich, creamy chocolate. All of that stuff sounds great, but it's not very healthy," he said.
Workshop participants Yangja Kim and Jason Sultana. Source: Supplied / Korean Culture Centre
"Everyone eats bread, but only Koreans eat tteok. If we can transform rice cakes into something everyone can enjoy, that would be great," he said.
