New Year's Doguk

photos by Yu Tsai 

This dish is a very special, traditional Korean New Year’s dish called Doguk. Its believed to grant the user good luck for the year and to grant a year of age. 

Doguk is warm and comforting. The soup consists of oval rice cakes, dumplings and can be garnished with scallions, sesame and eggs.My kids absolutely love this dish and ask for it during the cold winter months, not just at New Years. 

I’m creating a variation of this, as typically you would fry eggs, cut them in strips and add to the soup, but we’re going to make this like Chinese egg drop soup and drop a raw egg right into the boiling broth. This makes for a nice short cut and I actually prefer the way this tastes. 

For the base, I usually make a big batch of bone broth and store this in the freezer, you can find my bone broth recipe on my website here: Bone Broth Recipe

Serves 6  /  Prep Time 30 min  /  Cook Time 40 min  /  Difficulty Medium

Broth Ingredients:

• 1 quart bone broth 
• 1 TBL fish sauce
• 1 TBL soy sauce
• 16 oz rice cakes
• 1 scallion
• 1 egg
• 1/4 TSP black sesame seeds for garnish
  
  

Dumplings Ingredients:

• 1/2 LB pork
• 1/2 LB beef
• 4 cloves minced garlic
• 2 TSP minced ginger
• 1/4 CUP chopped scallions
• 2 TBL soy sauce
• 1 TSP pepper
• 1 TSP salt
• 1/2 tofu cake (put in between paper towels and top with weight to squeeze out liquid)
• 1/2 cup kimchi (squeeze and strain liquid and chop finely)

One of my kids favorite things to eat is dumplings, and what they love even more than eating them is making them! There are so many different ways to fold dumplings and my kids get really excited about making and eating all the varieties.

Directions:

1. Mix filling for the dumplings in a large bowl combining ground beef, ground pork, minced garlic, minced ginger, chopped scallions, soy sauce, chopped kimchi, tofu cake, salt and pepper.
2. Beat a whole egg into a bowl as an egg wash to bind our dumplings together.
3. Spoon one spoonful of dumpling filler onto the center of a wonton wrapper, brush the corners of the wrappers with the egg wash and pinch together.
4. Repeat until you’ve made 20.
5. Drop them on a floured cookie sheet and place in the freezer, as freezing helps to keep them intact when you drop them into the soup.
6. Use prepared bone broth and if frozen allow it thaw overnight. 
7. Combine bone broth, fish sauce, and soy sauce into a large pot and turn heat on high.
8. Add rice cake to the soup. Be sure to presoak the rice cake for about 30 minutes to make it soft.
9. Drop in our dumplings and allow them to simmer. When the dumplings float to the top they are ready to serve.
10. Crack one raw egg directly into the boiling soup. Break up egg in swirling motion with chopstick.
11. Garnish with scallion and black sesame seeds and serve.