Korean Snacks and Desserts: Trendy vs Classic, and What to Try This Winter

Eat the classics on purpose, and try the trendy dessert only if the line is short. Fish-shaped bungeoppang, a syrupy hotteok and a roasted sweet potato will still be there on your last day. Whatever dessert is viral this month might not be.

Korea's dessert of the month

Korean sweets run on two clocks. The first is the trend. One dessert blows up online, the lines form, every café copies it, and then it's gone. One season it's everywhere, the next nobody mentions it.

Oversized macarons stuffed with cream, ttungcarons ("chubby macarons"), peaked in the summer of 2020, and after that macarons just became a normal café item. Croffles, croissant dough pressed in a waffle iron, were the café hit around 2020, and you'll still see them on plenty of menus. Then came dujjonku, the "Dubai chewy cookie": pistachio cream and crunchy kadayif pastry wrapped in marshmallow. It started building around September 2025, searches peaked in the second week of January 2026, and by late February shops were sitting on unsold stock. Starbucks Korea launched a Dubai chewy roll on January 30 and pulled it in under two months.

By March it was beoteo-tteok, butter rice cake from Shanghai: glutinous rice dough baked with butter and milk, crisp outside and chewy inside. One Seoul café owner said daily demand had already halved within about two weeks of starting to sell it. The professors Korean papers quote on this keep making the same point: the cycle keeps getting shorter.

And this fall? Rice-cake desserts are still everywhere, and the one you'll spot first is fruit mochi: Shine Muscat grapes or blueberries wrapped in a thin layer of rice cake, with strawberry mochi as the one everyone pictures first. Honestly, I can't keep up anymore. By the time you land, it might be something else.

My rule for trends is simple. If the line is under twenty minutes and it's on your way, try it. If it's an hour across town, skip it. That hour is better spent sitting down somewhere warm.

Trendy vs classic, side by side

If you only have room for one, pick the classic. It's what people here actually eat on a cold Tuesday.

Winter street snacks: bungeoppang, hotteok, roasted sweet potato

When it gets cold, little stalls appear on busy streets and near subway stations.

Bungeoppang is batter poured into a cast-iron mold shaped like a carp, filled with sweet red bean paste. Bungeo is carp, ppang is bread. Some stalls also do custard cream. A fresh one from the street in winter, crisp at the edges with the red bean still steaming, is a small work of art. Eat it within a few minutes. It goes soft in the bag.

Hotteok is a chewy pancake pressed flat on a griddle, and the inside is melted brown sugar and cinnamon, often with chopped peanuts or seeds. Be careful with the first bite. That syrup is very hot and it drips. Hold it in the paper cup and bite from the edge.

Hotteok comes in a paper cup. Keep it there: the syrup drips. · Photo: Korea Tourism Organization (두잇컴퍼니 박여울) (opens in a new tab), "길거리 음식," 2020 / KOGL Type 1 (opens in a new tab)

Roasted sweet potatoes, gun-goguma, are cooked in big iron barrels at roadside stalls. They're sweeter than steamed ones and best eaten hot. You'll be blowing on yours, and peeling the skin back with your fingertips.

My favorite trick: convenience stores sell roasted sweet potatoes too once it turns cold, and they're really sweet. When I plan a day, it ends around 8:30 p.m. near the hotel. One warm goguma from the store downstairs is the perfect last snack. No line, no walk, then straight to bed.

Coming in November or December? Here's the weather and what to wear (opens in a new tab).

The doughnut stall at the end of the market alley

Walk into almost any traditional market, keep going toward the end of an alley, and you'll usually find a stall frying doughnuts in a big pot of oil.

The classic is kkwabaegi, a braided doughnut made from wheat or rice flour, fried, then rolled in sugar. Next to it you'll usually see round doughnuts filled with red bean or white bean paste, and goroke, Korean croquettes with a savory filling. Buy them hot.

Straight from the oil into the sugar. Buy them while they're warm. · Photo: Korea Tourism Organization (한국관광공사 이범수) (opens in a new tab), "신포국제시장," 2011 / KOGL Type 1 (opens in a new tab)

This is where I'd take you on a market afternoon: a doughnut, then sit down somewhere for twenty minutes before the next stop. If you want a guided first night at a market instead, I compared the options in Seoul food tour or DIY at Gwangjang Market (opens in a new tab).

Corn dogs, and the rest-stop dilemma

In Korea, hatdogeu (hot dog) usually means what you'd call a corn dog: a sausage or a stick of mozzarella in a rice- or wheat-flour batter, sometimes crusted with cubes of potato, fried, rolled in sugar and finished with ketchup. Sugar on a hot dog sounds wrong. Try it once.

The potato-cube version. Sugar and ketchup come after. · Photo: Korea Tourism Organization (알렉스분도) (opens in a new tab), "핫도그," 2021 / KOGL Type 1 (opens in a new tab)

You'll see corn-dog chains all over the country. Myungrang Hot Dog is one of the big ones, started in Busan in 2016, with hundreds of stores now.

The place a lot of Koreans connect with hot dogs, though, is the highway rest stop. Hot dogs and hodu-gwaja, little walnut cakes with red bean inside, are both on the rest stops' top-ten list by sales. If your day trip goes by bus, the rest stop is short. Bathroom first, snack second. And then my real decision in that line: a hot dog, or a hatba, a fried fish-cake bar on a stick. I won't decide for you. Get one each and share.

The classics that come in gift boxes: yakgwa, tteok and gotgam

Yakgwa is a flower-shaped honey cookie: wheat dough with sesame oil, deep-fried, then soaked in honey syrup with ginger. It's dense, chewy and very sweet. It used to be for ancestral rites and holidays like Chuseok, and lately it's back in bakeries too. Markets and supermarkets sell it, so it's an easy train snack.

Yakgwa: fried, then soaked in honey. One is plenty with tea. · Photo: Korea Tourism Organization (토라이 리퍼블릭) (opens in a new tab), "약과," 2023 / KOGL Type 1 (opens in a new tab)

Tteok, rice cake, is the base under half the trends above. Butter rice cake and fruit mochi are just new ideas wrapped in a very old food.

Gotgam are dried persimmons, chewy and naturally sweet. The famous ones come from Sangju, in North Gyeongsang Province, which makes about 60% of Korea's dried persimmons. They're a classic gift box for the holidays.

How to snack your way through a day without wrecking it

• Snack between stops, not instead of meals. One street snack in the afternoon, one at night. Three in a row and you'll skip dinner.
• Build in a seat. Most stalls have nowhere to sit. Buy, then walk to a café or a bench you already know about, and give yourself twenty minutes.
• Carry a small bag for trash. Street trash cans can be hard to find, and visiting friends are always surprised by that. Fold your paper cup into your bag and throw it out at the hotel.
• If the stall's gone, go to the store. Street stalls come and go. Plan B is the convenience store: roasted sweet potatoes in winter, and often a packaged version of whatever dessert is trending.

Ask: Igeo hana juseyo (ee-guh hah-nah joo-seh-yoh), "One of these, please." Igeo eolmayeyo? (ee-guh uhl-mah-yeh-yoh), "How much is this?" Point, and for two, say dul (dool) instead of hana, holding up two fingers. Sounds are approximate.

On your first cold evening in Korea, buy one bungeoppang from the first stall you pass, and eat it right there while it's hot.