Garaetteok is occastionally used in ritual offerings, such as ancestral worship and sacrificial offerings to spirits. More recently, garaetteok has become popular among young kids in a dish called tteokbokgi, made by drenching garaetteok in a spicy-sweet sauce. Under the slogan “Globalize Korean Food” a group of ambitious culinary professionals and government-supported organizations launched a special project to develop various forms of tteokbokgi as a representative item of Korean cuisine in the twenty-first-century global food market.
Garaetteok refers to a type of rice cake made by pounding rice dough and shaping it into long thin cylinders. Sliced garaetteok is the main ingredient in the special New Year food called tteokguk. According to the “Dongguk Sesigi”, the cylinder-shaped rice cake was also call baekbyeong, and the soup made with its slices was an essential part of the New Year’s festive food.