We don’t know why ddeokbokki, the spicy sweet rice cakes boiled in red pepper sauce with odaeng (fish cakes), has changed its name to ‘topokki’.  But perhaps this is all in the name of trying to globalize a street food into a corporate, pre-packaged export snack? 

Ask the Topokki Food Research Institute (TFRI), a research/lobby institute led by Lee Sang-hyo, a 49-year-old rice expert.   He and his associates are studying ways to standardize the recipie in order to help the food become Korea’s representative snack.   (Of course, the irony being that their first act was to change the name to topokki.)

Article here [Korea Times]

And if that gives you a hankering for salty-spicy-sweet ddeokbokki, then this weekend is the 2009 Seoul Topokki Festival!   Expect to see people featuring all kinds of recipies and be ready to eat lots of samples at the AT Center, located in southern Seoul.

For more information, visit http://www.topokki.com or call (02) 503-5044 

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