Rice Cake

When you think of a rice cake, you probably think of the flat cardboard-like circles of puffed rice often eaten as diet food. The rice cake we had the other day was the polar opposite of that. One of the students at my school brought homemade Korean rice cake as treat for everyone. This rice cake was made from scratch – so much so that the rice flour used to make it was ground from rice actually grown by his grandparents! This type of rice cake is thick, sticky, chewy, and only slightly sweet. Of course I had to Google it when I got home to find out what I had just eaten 🙂

According to www.livestrong.com:
Korean rice cake or Tteok is a desert, considered one of Korea’s oldest foods, important enough to have a museum dedicated to it. According to the Official Site of Korean Tourism, Tteok has close to 200 variations of size, shape, and color. Boiling, steaming, frying, or pounding are the most common methods that it is prepared.

The ingredients in rice cake depend on the variation of the recipe used. The rice cake we ate seemed to be from the most basic recipe that I found – rice flour, water, salt, and sugar. It was good but not something I’d eat on a regular basis. The students sure loved it!