The Quest to Spread Tteokbokki Love (rice cakes)
While reading some Korean fusion blogs (and discovering that people are as obsessed with tteokbokki as I am), I found a link to this article, “Can tteokbokkie rescue the rice industry?”
The article is about how the Korean food ministry is trying out new shapes and new sauces to give rice cakes a broader appeal to international audiences. “Instead of [the traditional] red pepper paste… cream and tomato sauces can be used for the European market, while sauce flavored with bonito flakes might appeal to Japan. For the Mexican market, the researchers are working on a pepper-based sauce.”
Basically, the ministry just needs to market it as a pasta, a gnocchi of sorts, something that goes with any kind of sauce you make.
And are those number shaped rice cakes I see? Want!
Saddest part of the piece: “One of the first steps along the road to spreading the word about the tasty snack was a name change. Tteokbokki was changed to “Topokki” to make it easier for non-Koreans to pronounce.”
C’mon non-Korean speakers. We can pronounce gnocchi but we can’t bother to learn tteokbokki? (Think duck-boke-ghee, with boke rhyming with poke and ghee as in see).
Hence the spelling of “topokki” in their image/logo:
Whatever. I’m game for spreading the love. These things are amazing. I had a modified version of the dish this morning (I added an egg, but kept the red paste sauce), and am most likely going to make them crispy for dinner tonight. Mmmm… tteokbokki.
