Chewy Korean rice cakes simmered in a rich and creamy, sweet and spicy sauce with a drizzling of stretchy Mozzarella – this Rose Tteokbokki is a favourite!

This easy Rosé Tteokbokki is a creamy twist to Korea’s favourite street snack! Rose simply refers to the pinky colour when cream is added to red sauces. Typically rose is used for pasta dishes, where cream is added to the red tomato-based sauces.

What do you need to make Rose Tteokbokki?

Rose Tteokbokki is extremely simple to make! All you need are these key ingredients:

Tteokbokki: These are chewy Korean rice cakes also known as garratteok. They come in cylindrical sticks, but there are also discs versions of it. You can use those for this recipe as well.

Stock: I used homemade Chicken Stock in this recipe, although traditionally a stock made out of dried anchovies or kelp is used. If you have no stock on hand, replace with water. This is the one recipe that actually works well with water! I would not recommend using stock cubes (like I usually would) since it would be far too salty. Gochujang is salty.

Gochujang: Korean red pepper paste that is spicy, salty and full of umami. This is a crucial ingredient for Tteokbokki and irreplaceable!

Honey: Tteokbokki has a sweetness to it, and I love using honey instead of sugar. I find the honey and gochujang combination works well together. If you have no honey, you can use regular sugar.

Heavy Cream: This is the key ingredient that turns this from plain Tteobokki to Rose Tteokbokki! You can also use milk in place of cream, although you won’t get as creamy a sauce. If you want to go extra creamy, you can even use milk in place of stock or water, and it will thicken as the Tteobokki cooks and releases starch. However, I found this could get too heavy sometimes so I prefer simply adding cream to stock.

The Perfect Rose Tteokbokki Sauce

Here’s a little secret, I use this sauce combo for pretty much any Korean dishes! This is the same configuration for my Kimchi Udon recipe, as well as a sauce for Bimbimbap!

Gochujang
Gochugaru
Light Soy Sauce
Honey
Sesame Oil

Of course Heavy Cream or Milk is also an important component for the Rose quality.

What Proteins to Add for Rose Tteokbokki?

I used Fishcakes, sliced to be about same length as the Tteokbokki. Most times, I do without the proteins! Tteokbokki is so good with just the rice cakes too.

Proteins that you can try include:

Fishcakes
Boiled Eggs
Sausages or Hotdogs
Bacon
Fried Tofu Skin

How to Prepare Tteokbokki?

I used chilled fresh tteokbokki. I followed the directions to prepare mine, which was to rinse in water.

Do I need to use Cheese?

Officially no… but I find it necessary for two reasons:

The fun cheese pull factor
The extra umami, milky flavour of cheese!

While I would usually use – perhaps even recommend – using other more flavourful cheeses, I would stick to Mozzarella for this! The mild, creamy flavour of it is perfect for this Rose Tteokbokki.

How to Serve Rose Tteokbokki?

For best results, serve immediately! If left to cool, I find the cheese and the cream is not as melty anymore, therefore not as fun an experience to eat this.

For this reason, I like to use an induction pot to make AND serve this! It keeps bubbling as it keeps the cheese all melty. Yum.

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