Gangjeong

Description

Traditional snacks Gangjeong and Yugwa

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In Korea, traditional snacks include Gangjeong and Yugwa, which are eaten on the first day of the first lunar month. These are similar to oranda, hangwa, and yakgwa, but they are different.

According to Wikipedia, Hangwa is a general term for traditional Korean snacks, and is also called Jogwa or Gwajeongryu, and it seems that there are many traditional snacks as a subset of them.

Gangjeong is made by putting rice in a puffer machine and puffing it on New Year’s Day or Lunar New Year’s Day, pouring hot taffy, and hardening it with peanuts, sesame seeds, and black beans.

Yugwa is made by shaping glutinous rice flour into an appropriate shape, drying it, frying it in vegetable oil, and then coating it with honey or rice syrup and puffing it with rice, sesame seeds, etc.

According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, Gangjeong is a type of Jogwa made by kneading wheat flour, honey, and glutinous rice flour, slicing it, drying it, and then frying it in oil. This is Yugwa rather than Gangjeong.

Depending on the ingredients used as a side dish, there are peanut gangjeong, black sesame gangjeong, sesame gangjeong, cinnamon gangjeong, and pine nut gangjeong. In the kitchen where you can see the corner where the rice cakes were pushed to one side to be cut to make tteokguk, each household would make the rice cakes and gangjeong themselves when Seollal approached.

 

The method of making it is to mix the puffed rice with malt syrup, add nuts, etc., mix well, place the dough on a clean cutting board, flatten it, and cut it with a knife when it hardens to a certain extent.

 

In contrast, yugwa is one of the foods served with tea when important guests visit the ancestral home. It has to go through a cumbersome process of kneading glutinous rice flour, maturing, drying it thoroughly, and then frying it in oil.

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Dakgangjeong is a dish made by frying chicken and then stir-frying it with a seasoning that has been reduced. Some people believe that the original form was kkanpunggi, but it is a separate dish with a different recipe and taste.

 

Oranda is a snack made by frying small bean-sized snacks called puffed beans or orandaalal-i in oil, coating them with syrup, and hardening them. Among Korean sweets, Tteobapgangjeong, which is made by frying rice, coating it with syrup, and hardening them, looks similar to Oranda. Of course, there are differences such as Tteobapgangjeong being much less hard.

Okoshi is a snack made by entangling and forming shapes with syrup, and is a word used a lot in the Yeongnam region, including Busan, and is similar to the Japanese word okashi, which means snack and was influenced by the Japanese to refer to gangjeong.