Red bean Porridge
….This popular and delicious porridge is made from dried red beans with chewy rice cake balls made from sweet rice flour. The porridge is creamy, nutty, and a little sweet. This recipe is actually pretty simple. It’s just a few ingredients, but every household makes it differently. Traditionally Koreans eat it on Dongjinal in Korean. We wish our families and friends a happy, successful, and safe year to come by making this special red bean porridge for them. When I was a kid, my mother used to send me out to deliver some of her red bean porridge to the neighbors bowl by bowl on winter solstice. And the neighbors’ kids brought red bean porridge to our house too. It’s too late to make it, but I wanted to make and share this with friends and family. I used an instant pot for boiling red beans and the instant pot made red beans very soft. The white rice cake balls look like small birds’ eggs and symbolize new life, freshness, and prosperity. They are a little smaller than quail eggs and celebrate the longer days to come.
Servings: 10–12
Time: 1 hour 20 minutes
Ingredients:
- 4 cups red beans, cleaned
- 2 1/2 tsp sea salt
- 10 cups water(when boiling the red bean)
- 10–12 cups water(when filtering red bean)
For rice ball:
- 4 cups(700 g)+1 tbsp sweet rice flour
- 2 tsp sea salt
- 2 cups boiling water
Cooking Instructions:
- Heat a pot with high heat and add the red beans and 5 cups water into the pot to boil it for 5–7 minutes(Remove a bitter taste of red beans).
2. Turn off the heat and clean the boiled red beans with water. Sift the red beans with a strainer.
3. Put the red bean, 10 cup water, and sea salt into an instant pot.
3. Cook to choose an optional function “bean chili pressure level normal”. Meanwhile, Put the sweet rice flour, and sea salt in a mixing bowl.
4. Add the boiling water and mix it well with a spatula. When it cools enough to touch, knead the dough with your hand for 1 minute and put it in a plastic bag. Let it sit for 20 minutes.
5. Knead the dough again for a couple of minutes until smooth. Take some of the dough in your palms and roll it into a 1/2 inch ball. Repeat to make rice cake balls out of all the dough. Sprinkle some sweet rice flour over them as you go so they don’t stick to each other.
6. After 30 minutes, turn off the instant pot heat and take out the pot.
7. Mash the boiled red beans with a spoon so that the beans go through the strainer and the skins stay in the strainer.
8. Pour water(10 cup) into the strainer. Squeeze the bean skins with your hands and discard.
9. Heat a pot with medium high heat and pour the bean mixture into the pot to boil stirring with a silicone spoon. The porridge will thicken a bit.
10. Add the rice cake balls and stir them in well.
11. Let it cook for 8–10 minutes until all the rice cake balls float to the surface.
12. Remove any floating bubbles with a spoon. Add some sea salt if it is too bland.
13. Turn off the heat and serve hot right away(with sugar, this is optional). Delicious even when eaten cold. Keep the leftovers in the fridge up to 3 days. When the red bean porridge cools down, the porridge thickens.
You can also view this recipe on instagram.
