Filled, Pan-Fried Korean Pancakes

H-O-T-T-E-O-K!

Hotteok by moi, with cinnamon-date-walnut filling

Good morning,

My introduction to hotteok, the Korean street food/snack, came in 2022, via a recipe¹ in the New York Times by Judy Joo and Priya Krishna. I hybridized that Times recipe with

Maangchi

’s² for a base recipe to try out. The dough is yeasted, so I adapted it further because I wanted to use sourdough starter and unrefined sugars—but I’ve included options below for no-sourdough and yes-cane-sugar. And I suspect this recipe should work well with a gluten-free flour blend that contains psyllium husk powder, as the “bread flour” variation in Good & Sweet does.

The lightly fried (sour)dough is chewy and dense, the walnut-cinnamon-molasses-y filling just perfect. Next, I want to try them filled with cheese and (separately) sweet red bean paste.

I highly recommend you make this recipe* ASAP. And here is my quick video showing how it’s done:

bybrianlevy

A post shared by @bybrianlevy

And—a few random recommendations:

• Pre-order

  Aran Goyoaga
  ’s The Art of Gluten-Free Bread (Sept. 23). While she hasn’t quite worked on this book for twenty years, she did work on it for several, and I’ve been keeping up with her progress and eagerly awaiting the resulting collection. Some of Goyoaga’s wisdom is included in this New York Times story for which I interviewed her.

• Keep an eye out for the opening of Bub’s Bakery in NoHo, NYC. It’s a new venture by my former colleague Melissa Weller (of Per Se, Sadelle’s, Roberta’s, etc.) that will feature her gorgeous baked goods with a twist: no soy, nuts, eggs, dairy, or gluten. Melissa and I worked together twenty years ago in the pastry department at Babbo, which will be re-opening this fall with a new owner and new/old chef. Read about both Bub’s and Babbo here.

• Read the essay “Equal in Paris” from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. Hilton Als mentioned it in a recent New Yorker story, so I sought it out to begin to repair the shameful blind spot I have in regards to Baldwin’s work.

• Read Alexandra Alter’s profile of author Kiran Desai, who spent twenty years working on her forthcoming novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Sept. 23).

• See Jaws on a big screen. The Spielberg film is celebrating its 50th anniversary and is playing in theatres around the country.

• Read

  charlotte
  Druckman’s essay “Food for Thought, and Fiction” in her newsletter,
  The Sweethearts
  .

Let me know if you make the hotteok. Have a good weekend. Talk to you soon.

Best wishes,

Brian

Formal Assignment P.S. is for paid subscribers. It’s just $6 a month—or even less for an annual subscription. I’m also trying out a pay-what-you-can subscription option.

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SOURDOUGH HOTTEOK RECIPE

For the dough: