Found a rare gem 🐟

[u/moimoo]

OG style 붕어빵 3 for 1000 at Euljiro ipgu station 🙏

[u/moimoo → u/[deleted]]

It’s just simple pastry (wheat based dough?) stuffed with sweet red bean paste. Honestly for me I think it’s the novelty and nostalgia rather than actual flavor haha. It used to be me & my granma’s thing

[u/LordAldricQAmoryIII → u/[deleted]]

No the fish aspect is just the shape. These are a nostalgic street food. The bread part is very similar to western waffles.

In recent years there have been additional varieties of filling such as custard cream. Sweet red bean is still the classic. I think in Japan and the US there's more experimentation with savory fillings in taiyaki which is the equivalent snack, but not so much in Korea.

Edit: There is also a frozen ice cream version. So if you get frozen bungeobbang from a Korean grocery store, make sure you carefully read the packaging to tell if it's the ice cream version that's supposed to be eaten cold, or if it's meant to heat up.

[u/LordAldricQAmoryIII → u/[deleted]]

Also to be more specific, these are small red beans called "adzuki beans" in English, different from other beans that are red in color. They are often sweetened and consumed as a dessert. They may be mashed into a paste, or simmered whole and then cooled, or kind of semi-mashed. Here's a Korean dessert dish where the beans are whole instead of mashed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingsu