Tried Making Tteokbokki, Spectacular Failure. What did I do wrong?

LONG POST

I wanna start by saying that when I try a recipe for the first time, I make sure to follow the steps exactly on the first try so that nothing goes wrong. So I genuinely have no idea what the heck happened here. Here is a full recount of everything I did so that hopefully somebody can tell me what I did wrong.

Oh, some of you might ask to see the video I was following. I didn’t follow one video super closely (for reasons you’ll see) but here are the two videos I looked at the most while making it. https://youtu.be/Yk-wKo9OEwM?si=VCXYUuUiUnkxbZet https://youtu.be/WzSsKCIUp_c?si=QnP3TRuo85lUXchk

So I’ve made tteokbokki several times in the past, but this time I wanted to make my own tteok. I don’t know if there’s a word for the oval disc-shaped tteok, but I much prefer using those instead of garaetteok. So I bought the right kind of rice flour and tried following along. I will say that this time, I didn’t follow a video super closely, but that’s because the previous day, I had watched a LOT of videos on how to make tteok, so I was familiar with the beginning steps. 2 cups of short grain rice flour, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1 cup of boiling water, combined little by little while mixing the flour. I know everybody does these steps slightly differently but this is the way I chose to do it. So as I was mixing this in a mixing bowl with a standard tablespoon, as expected, the flour thickened and mixing got difficult. So after it cooled down enough, I tried using my hands to mix it. Big mistake. I underestimated how sticky this flour gets when combined with water, and my hands were immediately covered in rice dough, to the point that I couldn’t just wash it off because that’ll throw off my measurements. So I got my brother to help by introducing a bit of extra flour into my hands to try to make it easier to get off my hands, and I had him scrape my hands off with the spoon. After a while, I got the vast majority of the dough off my hands and washed the rest off. This is so far the only mistake that I know I made. Whatever other mistakes I made, I’m completely oblivious to them. Since my measurements were now slightly off what with the added rice flour, I then meticulously analyzed a few videos, trying to match the consistency of my dough with the consistency of the dough in the videos. After a bit of that, I decided it was as close as I could get it and moved on to the next step. Steaming. I put the rice dough into a steamer and steamed it for 25 minutes. I just wanna say, I know some people microwave it instead, but I couldn’t do that because how to do that was too unclear. In each one of the videos where they microwave it, they never say what your goal is with microwaving it. Like how to tell when you’ve microwaved it enough. What’s the dough supposed to look like? What’s it supposed to feel like? One person even said that he can’t say how much you should microwave it for because it depends on the wattage output of your microwave but that he personally did it eight times, two minutes each time. One woman said that you need to microwave it on high, but my microwave has no high option. So since I didn’t have enough information on how exactly to microwave it, I steamed it like in other videos. Anyway, after that, the dough looked exactly like it did in the video I was following, so I went on to the pounding. This is where things REALLY went wrong. So one, we don’t have actual cutting boards yet. We’re still settling in to the new place, so we have like bendy thin plastic cutting boards that are super light. Two, we don’t have sesame seed oil. I looked for some at a store before trying to make this, but I couldn’t find any on that particular day. I remember one video said to use sesame oil, or any other oil that doesn’t have a strong flavor. So I used avocado oil. Three, I don’t have a rice pounding thing, so I used a glass bottle instead. I spread the avocado oil on the cutting board, put the rice dough on it, and started pounding. Actually there was another mistake I made, which was that I forgot to oil the bottle, so it stuck to the bottle like crazy. On top of that, the crappy-ass cutting board was so light that when I would lift up the bottle, the rice dough would stick to it and lift up the cutting board. Because for some reason it would stick to the cutting board as well. Realizing that there’s no way in hell that would work, I just oiled the counter, did my best to remove the dough from the cutting board, and tried pounding it on there. IT STUCK TO THE COUNTER. It didn’t stick for just a few poundings, and then it stuck HARD. I suspect that it’s something to do with how the material of the counter interacts with the dough, cuz after a bit I abandoned the bottle (same issue with the bottle, it would stick no matter what) and used my hands, kneading it with my fists. My hands were very oily at this point and it didn’t stick to my hands at all. So I plan to get a wooden cutting board and see if that fixes the sticking issue. Anyway, I did this for over fifteen minutes cuz I wanted super chewy tteok. Fifteen minutes of kneading, scraping the dough from the counter with a metal spatula, oiling the counter again, kneading the dough on the counter, and repeating this. For fifteen minutes. After this, I tried shaping the dough, but I couldn’t. It was too soft and oily so I put some rice flour on the counter and tried rolling around the dough like that, and now I could shape it. So I shaped it into a cylinder and tried cutting it. But it was WAY too soft. The cuts didn’t come out as discs, but as those abominations you see on the first picture. I put them on plates cuz they would have stuck to each other if I put them all on one plate or bowl or something. I was very disappointed, but I’ve come this far, so I was gonna make my tteokbokki with these and see how it turned out. I made the flavor paste thing, cut up whatever I wanted to put in there, threw the tteok into the pan and cooked.

The rice cakes frickin DISSOLVED INTO THE MIXTURE.

Not immediately, but when it got hot and started boiling, I noticed the consistency of the water became strange, in such a way that I could tell it was not gonna turn out like it’s supposed to, and after a bit I noticed why. All the tteok was gone. Completely dissolved. When it was done, the result tasted like disappointment. But, I don’t regret this. If I had done this on another day, the same thing would have happened anyway. I’m just really baffled how I managed to mess up such a simple recipe. What the hell did I do wrong???