Songpyeon (Half-Moon Rice Cakes with Sesame Filling)

Variations

• Five-colour songpyeon: plain white plus mugwort (green), kabocha (yellow), prickly pear (pink) and black sesame (grey). Stir the powders in at the flour stage; the water still has to be at a rolling boil whatever the colour.
• Mosi-ip songpyeon (Jeolla): boiled, finely ground ramie leaves worked into the dough. Deeper in colour and gentler in aroma than mugwort, and the leaf fibre makes the dough less prone to cracking.
• Potato songpyeon (Gangwon): made with the starch settled out of grated potato. Far chewier and translucent when cooked — closer to a different dish than a variant.
• Other fillings: mung bean, chestnut, toasted soybean, chopped jujube. Honey alone runs out, so bind it with sesame or bean paste into something stiff.
• Oryeo-songpyeon is the name for songpyeon made from the first rice harvested that year, offered at the ancestral rite.

Tips

• It has to be non-glutinous rice flour. Glutinous flour slackens, the half-moon collapses, and it stales differently — the texture drifts towards a chewy rice stick. Songpyeon's particular firm-but-soft bite comes from short-grain non-glutinous rice.
• Use wet-milled flour, the salted damp kind from a rice mill or the freezer aisle. With dry supermarket rice flour, add about 20% more water and knead longer, and expect cracking anyway. To mill your own, soak the rice at least 6 hours, drain, and grind it with salt (soaking).
• Boiling-water dough is the answer to having no gluten. Where a wheat dough is held by a gluten network, a rice dough is held by the viscosity of gelatinised starch (dough and gluten). Har gow wrappers work on exactly the same principle — boiling water poured onto wheat starch to make a translucent, stretchy dough. Neither works with cold water.
• Always add the water in stages. Rice flours differ in how much moisture they already carry, and a dough made too wet in one pour does not come back when you add more flour.
• Cracking has three causes: too little water, too little kneading, or dough that dried out. All three happen before the steamer, and none can be fixed in it.
• Less filling, better seal. Sugar melts and expands as it steams, so an amount that looks right while shaping is too much once cooked.
• Put a cloth under the steamer lid. Condensation dripping off it pits the surface and bleeds the colours (dry heat and moist heat).
• Sesame oil while hot. Brushed on cold it just sits on the outside and gives no sheen.
• Store at room temperature; the fridge is the worst place. Refrigerator temperature is where starch recrystallises fastest, so a day in there turns them hard as stones. Keep them covered at room temperature for the day, and beyond that wrap them individually, freeze, and re-steam from frozen. As with tteokguk rice cakes, the enemy of tteok is not time but the refrigerator.
• Where the name comes from: 송(松) means pine — they are named for being steamed on pine needles. The needles perfume them, stop them sticking to each other and let steam through evenly. Originally a piece of equipment, not a garnish.