Korean Rice Cake vs Mochi: Why Tteok Hardens and Mochi Doesn't
You bought a bag of tteok on Saturday, put it in the fridge the way you would treat any other fresh food, and by Monday the pieces clack against the bowl like plastic. A box of mochi sitting on the same shelf is still soft. Both are rice cakes in English, so the reasonable assumption is that they should behave the same way, and they don't. The question people type is whether tteok and mochi are the same thing. They start from different rice, and one of those rices carries roughly 18 to 21% amylose while the other has almost none. Two rices, one English word Korean kitchens divide rice into 멥쌀 (mepssal), ordinary non-waxy short-grain rice, and 찹쌀 (chapssal), the glutinous kind. Garaetteok, the cylinders you cut for tteokbokki and slice on the diagonal for tteokguk, is mepssal. A 2023 paper in Foods by Lee and colleagues describes it in one line: "Garaetteok is a long cylindrical rice cake, which is prepared by gelatinizing water and salt in rice flour." Mochi comes f...