Island Staple · Buckwheat Crepe
Bingtteok
Photo: Tong-Seob Kim / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
The radish filling is only lightly seasoned, so the crepe tastes mild, a plainness that suits its traditional place on Jeju's ancestral-rite and funeral tables.
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 — 3443 dishes from 118 countries.
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