Island Staple · Buckwheat Crepe
Bingtteok
Photo: Tong-Seob Kim / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Despite being one dish, it goes by a handful of different names depending which part of Jeju you're on — mengseok-tteok, hol-abang-tteok, jeongi-tteok — all describing the same buckwheat-and-radish crepe.
A thin buckwheat crepe is rolled around a filling of shredded radish, carrot, and scallion seasoned with sesame, then griddled until lightly crisp. It's a fixture at Jeju markets and ancestral-rite tables alike, eaten as a savory, portable snack.
Why it's made this way: With rice farming impossible on Jeju's volcanic soil, buckwheat and radish became two of the island's most reliable crops, and bingtteok is the dish that put them together — a specialty found nowhere else in Korea in quite this form.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
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