The Korean snack consisting of a sweet pancake filled with brown sugar is hotteok.
Hotteok is a popular Korean street food made from a yeast-raised dough of wheat flour, water or milk, sugar, and yeast. A ball of dough is filled with brown sugar, often mixed with cinnamon, peanuts, walnuts, or sunflower seeds, then pressed flat and fried on a greased griddle.
As the pancake cooks, the filling melts into a hot, syrupy center. Hotteok is especially associated with winter street-food stalls, where vendors serve it fresh and crisp outside but soft and molten inside. Sweet versions are the best-known, though savory vegetable and japchae fillings are also sold.
The snack is widely believed to have entered Korea through Chinese merchants during the late 19th century, when it developed into a distinctly Korean treat. Spellings such as hoddeok and hoeddeok represent pronunciation or romanization variants, but hotteok is the standard English article title. Bungeoppang, by contrast, is a fish-shaped pastry with a sweet filling.