In South Korea, New Year’s Day happens twice a year: once on Jan. 1 on the Gregorian calendar, and again on the first day of the lunar calendar. Both days are celebrated with tteokguk, a simple soup made by cooking thin oval-shaped tteok, or rice cakes, in broth until tender. “Tteokguk is one of the most significant dishes in Korean tradition,” write chefs Jungyhun Park and Jungyoon Choi in The Korean Cookbook. “On the first day of the new year, tteokguk was eaten as the first meal in tribute to ancestors.”
While the version below calls for homemade anchovy broth, a widely used ingredient in Korean cuisine, it can be swapped out for beef broth or vegetable broth. Look for dried anchovies with smooth, shiny scales. If they’re not fully dried, Park and Choi suggest microwaving them for 30 seconds to dehydrate fully. They also recommend cleaning the dried anchovies by slitting the stomach and removing the black organs, although many Korean home cooks skip this step. Since anchovy broth is so commonly used in Korean cuisine, you can also find pre-batched sachets of anchovies, dasima (dried kelp), and dehydrated vegetables at Korean markets.
For this dish, the traditional rice cake shape is thin coins, which are often labeled as tteokguk tteok. Look for them fresh in the prepared or refrigerated sections of a Korean grocer, or frozen in the freezer aisle.
Adapted from The Korean Cookbook © 2023 by Junghyun Park and Jungyoon Choi. Reproduced by
