Black Sesame Hotteok

Black Sesame Hotteok

Recipe and post by Amy Nguyen. Follow her on Instagram @amyycooksfood.

Black Sesame Hotteok

Hotteok is a popular Korean street food. It is a type of sweet pancake made with a sticky yeast dough typically filled with a brown sugar filling. Now..you may be asking, how does Korean food have anything to do with a Vietnamese American home cook? 

Well…to be totally candid, I was a massive k-pop fan as a pre-teen..like MASSIVE and can we please emphasize the past tense of that sentence! I remember watching my favorite idol (I think it was G-Dragon at the time) make prepackaged hotteok (well, microwave it). As any truly obsessed k-pop stan..I wanted to try what my biases liked.

BUT! I grew up in the midwest and you can only imagine the huge lack of Korean food around me. So whenever I wanted to try Korean food, I had to make it. Thankfully I was born in the era of the internet! Shoutout to Maangchi for teaching me how to make Korean food! The first time I tried her hotteok recipe, I quickly became obsessed. I would make tons and tons of hotteok for my siblings and I. From the traditional brown sugar to japchae to mozzarella cheese. 

And even now, my siblings get so excited to smell hotteok in the air. For me, sharing food is my love language, and I think the various non-Vietnamese dishes I have adapted into my cooking repertoire really encompases my passion for sharing food! While my crazy k-pop days are pretty embarrassing…it made me the jack of all trades home cook I am today! Now..my anime obsession years?? Well that’s a story for another day. 

I’ve since tweaked Maangchi’s hotteok recipe to make it my own. I like to use mochiko to give a slightly chewy texture, and I still enjoy experimenting with different fillings. This recipe uses Rooted Fare’s Black Sesame Crunchy Butter which gives the pancakes a more nutty, toasted flavor.

Black Sesame Hotteok

Prep: 1 hour

Cook: 15-20 mins

Serves: 8

Ingredients

Dough

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • ½ cup Mochiko sweet rice flour
  • 1 c up water
  • 2 tsp instant dry yeast
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 2 tbsp oil

Filling

Steps

  1. Combine the warm water with sugar. Sprinkle in the yeast and add the oil. 
  2. In another bowl, combine the all purpose flour, Mochiko sweet rice flour, and salt. Add the yeast mixture. Stir, wrap, and let rise for 30-40min
  3. After the dough has doubled in size, lightly knead and divide the dough into 8 pieces.
  4. To make the filling, combine the black sesame crunch butter, chopped nuts, and sugar. Set aside.
  5. Flatten a dough ball and add 1tbsp of the filling to the center. Wrap the dough around the filling
  6. Heat a pan with oil. Add the filled dough. Once the bottom is golden brown, flip and flatten the dough. Cook till golden brown.
  7. Flip once more and cook till the edges brown.  
  8. Repeat with remaining filled dough balls.
  9. You're done! Serve while they're hot.

cross cut of a Black Sesame Hotteok

We'd love to know how you liked the recipe! Share your creation and tag us @rooted.fare on Instagram or @rootedfare on TikTok for a chance to be featured. 

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Amy Nguyen is a proud first generation, low income, Vietnamese American student. She is currently a senior in college who loves to cook! In fact, she cooks and films straight out of her dorm room..I know, hard to believe. When she was younger, she’d stay in and help her mom cook while her siblings played outside. As the child of an immigrant, food is the main way she stay connected to her roots, and she loves sharing good food with good people.

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