Asian Pear Butter Hotteok (Korean Sweet Pancakes)
This Asian pear butter hotteok is an original take on the classic Korean sugar-filled fried pancake. The bread is soft and chewy, and the filling makes it taste like a fall fruit pie. Served hot, it’s perfect to enjoy on a cold fall or winter day.
Hotteok (hoddeok, hodduk, 호떡) is a popular street food in Korea. You eat it when it’s made fresh and still hot. They usually fold it and serve it in a paper cup to make the hot hotteok easier to hold while eating.
The pancake has a crispy fried outside and a chewy inside. With this Asian pear butter hotteok recipe you can make about six pancakes. Leftovers still taste pretty delicious if you heat them up for about 30 seconds in the microwave.
If you are craving some more dessert, try checking out these double chocolate cookies or strawberry oat milk.
Hotteok Dough
The dough is made with flour, sweet rice flour, sugar and yeast. The sweet rice flour gives hotteok its chewy texture.
I generally like to make everything from scratch. However, this recipe is one exception. The dough is prepared with yeast and requires about one hour to rise. To skip this long rest time, I use this pre-made mix from H-mart. The dough from these pre-made mixes usually only require five minutes of kneading before it’s ready for use.
Asian Pear Hotteok Filling
The Asian pear filling does take a bit of time to cook and reduce, but it is well worth it. I adapted Chef Joanne Chang’s recipe for apple butter from her book, Pastry Love. Her bakery, Flour Bakery, is one of the main things I miss from Boston. And so quite often I would pull out this book to bake some of my favorite recipes.
I made a few adjustments to her recipe, and found it to work perfectly with hotteok. I like using pear butter instead of sautéed chopped pears because the flavor is more concentrated.
It is also popular to add some nuts and seeds to the hotteok filling. I recommend adding some pumpkin seeds and/or chopped walnuts.
The filling typically consists of dark brown sugar and cinnamon powder that melts into a delicious and gooey syrup. However, I have also seen savory combinations using cheese, kimchi, and vegetables.
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Mise en place
If you make this Asian Pear Butter Hotteok, I would love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to leave a comment and/or recipe rating at the bottom of this page. And if you have a photo of your food, be sure to tag me on Instagram!
Asian Pear Butter Hotteok (Korean Sweet Pancakes)
Ingredients
- 1 hotteok mix (premix, yeast, warm water)
Asian Pear Butter
- 225 g Asian pear (cored, peeled and chopped) (about 1 large Asian pear, or 3 bosc pears)
- 2½ tbsp cane sugar
- 1 tbsp unsalted butter
- 1 pinch cinnamon
- ⅛ tsp vanilla paste
- pumpkin seeds (optional)
Instructions
Asian Pear Butter
- Add the Asian pear butter ingredients to a small sauce pan.
- Stirring occasionally, let it cook over low heat for about 30 minutes or until pears start breaking down.
- (The pears will release water. However, it will eventually reduce while cooking. The pears will eventually caramelize and form a thicker paste.)
- Mash the pears so that you get a mostly uniform paste. It is fine to still have some chunks of pear left.
Making the hotteok
- Follow the package instructions for the hotteok mix. You will have to knead the premix, yeast, and some lukewarm water together for about 5 minutes. Greasing your hands with some canola oil will help the dough not stick as you roll the dough into balls.
- Flatten a ball of dough into a flat disk. Add about 1-1½ tbsp of the cooled Asian pear butter and some pumpkin seeds to a flattened roll of dough.
- Close the dough over the filling by pinching the edges together, taking care to not rip the dough.
- Add a thin layer of canola oil to a skillet on low heat. Add the filled hotteok balls to the pan with the wrapped side facing down. Try not to overcrowd the pan.
- Flip them after about 10 seconds and flatten them with the back of a spatula.
- Continue to flip them every 15-20 seconds for about 2-3 minutes or until they are crispy and browned.
- Serve immediately.