Soups & Stews · Season 23 · Season of Winter I

Tteokguk

Tteokguk (New Year Rice Cake Soup) · 떡국

Difficulty: Easy
Time to plan: 40 min
Serves: 3 servings
Recipe: 5 steps
Listed places: 2

Food notes and context

This tteokguk cooks sliced rice cakes in beef broth with egg and seaweed garnish. Frozen, refrigerated and freshly made cakes can require different soaking and cooking times.

Compare the bowl with a version that includes dumplings. Rice cakes change texture while sitting in broth, so prepare around serving time. References to counting age are cultural expressions, not a property of the food.

Cook this version

Images are AI-generated illustrations, not records of a kitchen test. Follow the written ingredients and steps. Ingredients and substitutions guide

Ingredients (3 servings)

Ingredient	Amount	Substitute abroad
Sliced rice cake for soup	500g	Joraengi tteok
Beef brisket	200g	Anchovy-kelp stock, bone broth packs
Eggs	2	Egg garnish strips or ribbons
Roasted seaweed and scallion	A little	Anywhere
Soup soy, salt, garlic	To season	Anywhere
Sesame oil	1 tbsp	For sauteing the beef

Step by step

1.Soak the tteok
Soak the rice cake slices in cold water for 20 minutes.
2.Saute and simmer the broth
Saute brisket in sesame oil, add water, simmer 20 minutes, and season with soup soy.
3.Boil the tteok
Add the soaked cake to the boiling broth and cook until the slices float.
4.Ribbon the egg
Drizzle beaten egg in circles into the boiling broth and lower the heat at once.
5.Garnish and serve
Bowl the soup and top with seaweed, scallion, and the beef.

Measurement, doneness and storage references

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Places to check when planning a meal

Candidates to investigate for this food. Maps use sourced location records; confirm the current menu, opening and booking directly. This list is not a tasting review or an award certification.

National Folk Museum Seollal Festival

Jongno, Seoul

Exact current location is not verified here. Confirm the venue through its official information before planning a visit.

Gyeongdong Market Mill Alley

Dongdaemun, Seoul

Exact current location is not verified here. Confirm the venue through its official information before planning a visit.

The fictional face of this dish

Metal element · an angular, solid face

You know how to reset yourself every year. A face like the first bowl of tteokguk on New Year's morning.

Upright: One bowl, one year: stir last year's failures into the broth and swallow them down. At the New Year's first table, the successful and the stumbling start again from the same white soup.

Reversed: Eating two bowls does not make you two years older, and hurrying the bowl count does not make you an adult. Age comes not from the broth but from how you empty the bowl.

The K-Roast take: Grandma's roast

Fictional food metaphors inspired by traditional face-reading, not measurements of your face or personality.

Those eyes are clear as a New Year's dawn: reset eyes. Do you know what tteokguk's whiteness means? The white ethic of washing off the old year and starting clean. Your eyes are that white broth, and people who meet you find the courage to begin again. Only grant that same reset to yourself, child. Stop relaunching everyone else while your own year sits unwashed.

That nose runs straight and white as a garae-tteok: wealth drawn out long. Why is the cake pulled long? So fortune and lifespan stretch with it. And why slice that long cake into coins? So wealth rolls in from every direction. Pull long, slice round: that is your earnings formula too. Take the long view, and collect in small round pieces.

That mouth is plain and immaculate: a first-spoonful mouth. Tteokguk is the year's first official food, and nobody takes it carelessly. Your words are received like that first spoonful, and a remark you toss off can become someone's plan for the year. Know that weight and choose your opening line. Your mouth is a New Year's morning table.

Tteokguk returns without fail even after a failed year, holding out a new bowl. Whatever last year was, the broth before you is white again. Receive it not as pressure to act your new age, but as permission to start over.
Grandma's blessing

Table compatibility

Tteok-mandu-guk, where rice cake meets dumpling in one bowl, is the North and South's New Years reconciled, while midsummer mulhoe holds the first table of its own season and neither ever covets the other's seat.