Korean Street Fritters Called Twigim, and the Batter Behind the Crunch

Pale, heavy fritters with a slick of oil on the crust are what usually come out of the pot on a first attempt. The batter went in at room temperature, thickly coated, into oil that had not yet reached frying heat, so the crust soaked up fat instead of shedding it. The fix is ice-cold batter, properly hot oil and small batches, and this page works through why each one matters.

The snack is also younger than its reputation. Deep frying was a rarity in Korean kitchens for most of their history, and that explains a good deal about how twigim is cooked, sold and eaten, which this page follows from the word itself to the fryer and then to the dip.

A cooking method that became a snack

The Standard Korean Dictionary defines twigim as fish, meat or vegetables coated in flour and fried in oil. The Folk Encyclopedia adds a point the dictionary leaves out: the word names a technique rather than a single dish, so it needs an ingredient in front of it to become a food, as in chicken twigim, squid twigim or potato twigim. The coating, called twigim-ot, is a thin mixture of water with wheat flour, fritter mix, glutinous rice flour or starch.

The word is younger than the habit of eating the food. Cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s, among them Bang Sin-yeong’s Joseon yori jebeop and Yi Yong-gi’s Joseon musang sinsik yori jebeop, introduced fried dishes under the Japanese loanword denbura. In 1949 the Hangul Society and a group promoting exclusive use of Hangul set out to replace Japanese words on shop signs, and from then on denbura gave way to twigim.

Choosing and cutting the filling

A tray usually holds whatever the stall had that morning, and the recipe card on this page follows the same logic: sweet potato, onion, carrot, whole perilla leaves and shrimp. Thickness decides everything, because the inside has to cook through in the same three to four minutes the batter takes to brown, so cut thinner than seems necessary.

Vegetables

Sweet potato matchsticks and onion rings are the backbone, with julienned carrot and whole perilla leaves for variety. Zucchini rounds are the card’s listed stand-in for onion rings, and shiso replaces perilla, or the leaves can be skipped in favour of more of the other vegetables.

Seafood

The card calls for eight shrimp, peeled and deveined, with the tails left on; sliced squid is the listed alternative, and an all-vegetable batch works too. Pat everything dry first, because surface water keeps batter from clinging, and keep the pieces a similar size so they come out of the oil together.

Gimmari and dumplings

Gimmari, glass noodles rolled in dried seaweed, and frozen dumplings are the other regulars on a tray, and both take the same batter. The dumpling itself has a story of its own in the dumpling guide.

The batter is the whole recipe

The card builds the batter from 150 g of flour, 50 g of cornstarch or potato starch, half a teaspoon each of baking powder and salt, and 250 ml of ice-cold water, a three-to-one split of flour to starch. Starch is on the usual list of coating ingredients, so the split is convention, not a trick. Two habits matter more than the formula.

Keep it ice-cold

The bowl should feel cold against your hand. Cold batter meeting hot oil throws off steam quickly, and that steam puffs and crisps the crust instead of letting it settle into a dense shell. The card allows cold sparkling water for extra crispness, and in a warm kitchen the bowl can sit over ice.

Stop stirring early

Whisk the dry ingredients together first, pour in the water and stir only until the flour is wet, leaving a few visible lumps, as the card instructs. Beating the batter smooth develops gluten, and gluten makes a fritter chewy instead of light.

Oil temperature, and why batches stay small

The card heats about a litre of neutral oil to 170 to 180°C (340 to 355°F) in a deep, heavy pot and tests it with a drop of batter, which should sizzle and rise within a couple of seconds. Oil that is too cool does not fry so much as slowly soak the batter in fat, and that is the whole difference between crisp and greasy.

Batch size follows the same logic, since more food in the pot drags the temperature down faster than the burner can recover. The card fries four or five pieces at a time for three to four minutes and says to watch the bubbling around them, which slows visibly once the water has cooked off, rather than the clock. Between batches the oil is allowed to climb back to temperature.

Pieces come out onto a wire rack, not paper towels, so steam escapes from underneath instead of softening the bottom. Most Koreans buy twigim rather than make it, the encyclopedia’s entry on twigim notes, because frying needs a lot of oil and leaves an awkward clean-up. That is a fair reason to plan one pot of oil for the whole meal and to fry everything in a single session.

Recipe card photo: Korean.cuisine-Goguma_twigim-01.jpg by karendotcom127, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The dip, and the stall habit

The card’s dip takes thirty seconds: three tablespoons of soy sauce, two of rice vinegar, a chopped scallion and half a teaspoon of gochugaru. At a snack bar the usual arrangement is a plate of twigim beside tteokbokki, and many customers dip into that red sauce instead. Korean-Chinese restaurants play with the same pairing, a crisp coating against a sauce, in tangsuyuk, the sweet-and-sour fried pork.

The twigim entry explains the pairing: Koreans mostly think of twigim as something eaten with tteokbokki, which is why bunsik shops and tteokbokki stalls sell so many kinds. Bunsik originally meant foods made from flour, such as noodles and bread, and now names the simple one-plate dishes that these shops sell, tteokbokki and kimbap among them, as its entry on bunsik describes. A roll of kimbap from the same counter rounds out the order.

Tteokbokki has a timeline of its own. The encyclopedia describes the old dish as rice cakes stir-fried with beef and vegetables in soy seasoning, and credits the red gochujang version to Ma Bok-rim’s stall in Sindang-dong in 1953, where a tteokbokki alley grew up after the 1970s. Wheat rice cakes and fish cake, cheap because of American aid flour and factory production, helped it become a popular snack.

Where twigim parts from jijim

Set against jijim, the thin-oil pan-frying that dominated older Korean kitchens, twigim looks like a different craft. The Folk Encyclopedia says that Joseon-era documents have a word for pan-fried food, jeon, but none for deep-fried food, and that the denbura recipes of the 1910s and 1920s describe floating the food in oil, a clear step away from the thin film used in jijim.

Oil explains the gap. In the Folk Encyclopedia’s account, animal fat was hard to get when meat itself was precious, plant oils could not be pressed in quantity, and fried sweets such as yakgwa and yugwa were festive extras. Oil began to spread with American aid during the Korean War era, and from 1975, when Dongbang Oil started mass-producing soybean oil, home cooks could use it freely. Its own verdict is that twigim’s popularity outruns its history.

The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, in its entry on tuigak, fried kelp, supports the picture. It says Korean oil cooking was mostly pan-frying of the jeon and jeonbyeong kind, and that deep-frying stayed narrow, limited to sweets and snacks such as yakgwa, gangjeong, bugak and tuigak. It adds that frying was originally a technique of temple kitchens, and presumes that monks, restricted in what they could eat, developed oil-heavy cooking for that reason.

Leftovers and the reheating question

Twigim is best within minutes of leaving the oil and only gets worse. Refrigerate leftovers loosely covered instead of sealed, since an airtight box traps moisture against the crust, and reheat them in a hot oven or an air fryer for a few minutes; the microwave steams the batter and leaves it limp. As a weeknight shortcut, brush battered pieces lightly with oil and air-fry them, accepting a crust that is thinner and less shattering than a true deep fry. Cut vegetables ahead and keep them wrapped in the fridge, but mix the batter just before frying, because it loses its lift the longer it sits.

A lid within reach

If the oil ever ignites, slide a lid over the pot and turn off the heat; never pour water on it.