Looking for two Korean(ish) food items

Last week I was at the Super H-Mart in Naperville. Presumably because it was late in the day, pickings were slim at the food court bakery, but I picked up a bag of something labeled as fried tofu. Each piece resembled a fried wonton strips with black sesame seeds rolled into the dough(?). (I probably never would have guessed it was tofu if I hadn't been told.) Not too greasy, a touch of sweetness and just an all-round tasty little snack food. Has anyone seen this for sale closer to the city?

My Mom lives in NJ and I usually fly into PHL when visiting. Driving down 76 near Cherry Hill, there's an H-Mart. Several years ago we were shopping in there & they had a machine making fresh puffed rice cakes. I think the bag calls them bang pops or bang puffs. They're nothing like what we commonly think of as rice cakes...these are light yellow disks about 10" in diameter & a quarter-inch thick. Unlike Americanized rice cakes, you can't see individual grains of rice. It's made in a machine that produces a loud bang when it spits these things out, so I can only imagine that the operator feeds in something looking like an uncooked popadum wafer, it's quickly heated and puffs up with a bang. Anyway, they're tasty to mindlessly snack on, but I can't find them anywhere in Chicago. Ironically, almost every major grocery store in central NJ now sells these Korean rice cakes....some Korean bang pop machine distributor is apparently doing booming business in Central NJ. Anyone have any clue where I might find these in Chicago? (The Asian grocery store that--I think--is near Damen & the expressway, sells something that looks the same but is too sweet, and may be made with other grains. The ones I've eaten are just lightly salted.)

Hi,

There is a puff rice cake device at H-Mart in Niles. It is a booth adjacent to the fried chicken, which is across from the food court on the other side of the vegetable department. The rejects are available free as samples.

Regards,

Cathy2 wrote:Hi,

There is a puff rice cake device at H-Mart in Niles. It is a booth adjacent to the fried chicken, which is across from the food court on the other side of the vegetable department. The rejects are available free as samples.

Regards,

Thanks Cathy! It must have been added since I was last at H-Mart (which, admittedly, was a while ago).

I believe the thin strip tofu you describe is yuba. It's actually tofu skin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu_skin

spinynorman99 wrote:I believe the thin strip tofu you describe is yuba. It's actually tofu skin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu_skin

Now that you mention it, that makes complete sense.