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Tarak-juk (Milk and Ground Rice Porridge)

Name: Tarak-juk (Milk and Ground Rice Porridge)
Prep time: 2 h 10 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 2 h 25 min
Yield: 2 servings
Cuisine: Korean
Ingredients: 80 g short-grain white rice; 240 ml water; 400 ml whole milk; 1 pinch salt; honey or sugar; 1 tsp pine nuts

A Korean court porridge: soaked rice ground to a fine slurry, cooked until it thickens, then loosened with milk added in stages and given a few minutes more. The milk is the dish and the rice is what thickens it, so the rice is ground and the whole pot is done in minutes. A pinch of salt in the pot, honey at the table.

Ingredients

2servings

short-grain white rice · soaked 2 hours80 g
water · for grinding240 ml
whole milk · at room temperature400 ml
salt1 pinch
honey or sugar · at the table
pine nuts · optional, to garnish1 tsp

Steps

Wash the rice and soak it in cold water for 2 hours.
Drain and blend with the 240ml water until very fine, then pass it once through a fine sieve. This slurry comes to about 0.8 times the volume of the milk.
⏲ 2 min
Pour the slurry into a heavy-based pot over medium-low heat and stir constantly with a wooden spoon, scraping the base, until it thickens and turns slightly translucent.
⏲ 5 min
Add the milk in three or four goes, stirring all the time; once it is smooth again, add the next. Keep it at a tremble at the edges, never a rolling boil.
⏲ 7 min
Off the heat, season with a pinch of salt. Serve at once with pine nuts on top, and honey or sugar at the table.

Variations

Sweetened in the pot. A tablespoon of honey stirred in at the end.
Some glutinous rice. Swap part of the rice for glutinous rice for a stretchier porridge.
From rice flour. Wet-milled rice flour mixed with water stands in for the slurry and skips the soaking and grinding. It is coarser and less smooth.
Next to pine-nut porridge. Grind pine nuts with the rice the same way and it moves towards jatjuk.

Tips

Grind the rice fine. Cooked from whole grains, the milk spends far too long on the heat before the rice softens.
Cook the slurry first, add the milk after. The milk goes in once the rice has thickened.
More milk than slurry. The ratio in the Gyuhap chongseo is 1 of milk to 0.8 of slurry.
Keep stirring. A thickened porridge catches from the base.
Eat it straight away. As it cools it sets and weeps water.

More detail and the reasons why (1)

The same problem, a different answer. Saleeg notes that milk added at the start and boiled until the rice collapses catches on the base and turns grainy, so it adds the milk last (dairy and heat). Tarak-juk changes the rice rather than the order. Ground to a slurry first, the rice's starch thickens in minutes, so the milk simply never sits on the heat for long. Jeonbokjuk stops its rice at halves and warns that ground fine it turns to paste; tarak-juk wants exactly that paste, because the rice here is not meant to stay as grains at all. Its only job is to thicken the milk. That is why the milk has to outweigh the slurry: the other way round you get a milk-flavoured rice paste.