Seven Days of Salt Bread: Eating My Way Through South Korea’s Bakeries

Last year, I embarked on a capsule wardrobe challenge for a trip to New Zealand. It left me freezing, frazzled and hacking my clothes with scissors.

Naturally, ahead of a holiday to South Korea, I set myself a new challenge: visit a different salt bread bakery every day for seven days.

For the uninitiated, salt bread (or sogeum-ppang) is the latest K-food trend to explode on social media. It looks kind of like a croissant, but it’s actually a non-laminated milk bread, with dough hand-rolled over a brick of butter that melts during the baking process to create a crisp, croissant-like base with a hollow centre and a bread-like topside. 

Salt bread isn’t strictly Korean – it’s a sibling to the lighter Japanese shio pan, which made the jump to Korea in the 2020s and exploded in popularity, peaking in 2025. The US caught on too, and Eater reported on the trend in February this year. 

I’d never tried it, but to me the outcome was a foregone conclusion: butter, bread, salt  – they’d never let me down before. So, with my rose-coloured glasses, I packed off to Seoul to meet my match.

Day one: Artist Bakery, Anguk, Jongno District, Seoul

Order: Plain (soft) salt bread, a red bean-stuffed salt bread with a craquelin top, an Earl Grey custard-filled salt bread

It’s early on our first morning in Korea. I kick off my salt bread crawl with the number one recommendation from Broadsheet’s food and drink features editor Dan Cunningham (he was in Seoul in September 2024). He spotted the crowd, investigated and ended up visiting twice. I knew there’d be a line, so I join the virtual queue on South Korea’s ubiquitous restaurant reservation app Catch Table.

As we leave our Airbnb, we’re 43rd in the queue. Two subway transfers and a stroll later: 39. A coffee up the road to kill time: 37. We leave the area entirely for an excellent dumpling lunch at Bukchon Son Mandu. 23.

I join the much-shorter virtual queue for takeaway. When you’re at the front of the virtual queue you’re allowed to enter the physical queue outside the shop. When they ring a bell, one person is allowed to leave the outside queue for the inside queue.

The bell tolls and I enter. Inside is like an odd amalgam between Parisian bakeries and NYC lofts. English signs outnumber Korean ones. The branding – a philosophical sausage dog and two alien owners – is everywhere, along with slabs of English musings. Its most popular refrain, printed on all the bags, is: “I thought I loved everything about bread, but I recently realised that it’s because there’s no bad bread in the world.”

After hours waiting, it’s time to try this thing, or three: a plain, unfilled salt bread; a red bean-stuffed option with a craquelin top; and one filled with Earl Grey custard. 

The bread? Not that buttery. I’d watched bakers rolling them, wrapping dough around huge hunks of butter. Where did it all go? It leaves a huge cavern, which accounts for the filled breads. I like it, naturally, but I admit it fails to meet the expectations built by hours of queuing and an endless stream of social content.

About half of the breads at Artist have little signs on them that say “Best” or “Number 1”. Seems impossible that they could all be the best. I will investigate.

Day two: Jayeondo Sogeumppang & Artist Bakery (again), Jongno District, Seoul

Order: Jayeondo bun and milk cream-filled Artist bun

I thought there would be heated disagreement among Koreans about where to get the best salt bread, but every Korean I spoke to suggested I go to Jayeondo Sogeumppang. 

On a food tour that day, my guide explains that Jayeondo popularised salt bread for Koreans. They only have one flavour (plain).

It’s soft and rich. It could be saltier, but I like it more than the plain bread at Artist. From this moment, I commit to ordering at least one plain, unfilled bread at every location for comparison.

I walk back through Anguk. No queue outside Artist, so we walk straight in. I get the cream-stuffed salt bread. It’s my pick of Artist’s options. It’s physically heavy with thick whipped cream filling the entire butter cavity, but it’s sweet and makes the dense treat feel lighter somehow.

Day three: Cafe Onion Anguk, Seoul

Order: Traditional salt bread

Other than Artist, Cafe Onion is probably the most viral salt bread spot in Seoul. It’s located in a traditional Korean hanok and it’s not on Catch Table, which was rare in my experience of Seoul.

Unlike Artist, Onion sells more than just salt bread. There are bagels, kouign-amann and more. (I highly recommend the mocha, described on the menu as “the best chocolate latte ever”.)

This salt bread has the most visible salt on top and a huge cavern inside. In the plain salt bread race, it ranks above Artist but below Jayeondo. It beggars belief considering how it was made, but I think it needed more butter? It improved when I dipped it into my choccy latte.

Day four: Gamcheon Bakery, Busan 

Order: Gamcheon salt bread

We take the train to Busan, a large seaside town around 350 kilometres south of Seoul. Busan is dominated by massive towers clustered on the coast. The part of the city you may have seen on social media is Gamcheon Culture Village and its coloured houses on tight and winding laneways. 

Gamcheon Bakery is abuzz, mainly with tourists, so I expect the price and the quality to rise and fall respectively. The base doesn’t have the croissant crisp I’ve come to expect, but the top of the bread is crusty like a bread roll. It’s served in a cup for on-the-go eating. It’s inoffensive. Three out of five. My least favourite so far. 

Day five: Do Not Disturb Bakers, Gyeongju

Order: Salted butter roll, and strawberries and cream-stuffed salt bread

We spend a day in Gyeongju, which was the capital of Korea during the Silla Dynasty and is now a Unesco World Heritage Site known as “the museum without walls”.

We pick up two buns from Do Not Disturb Bakers and go upstairs to eat them, sitting by a window looking out towards a huge burial mound. It’s an odd memento mori – gorging yourself on pastry directly in front of an entombed royal.

Thoughts of death aside, these are great buns. The plain bread is glossy, with a satisfying crisp bottom. It’s sweeter than the others I’ve tried so far. It rockets onto the podium as the second-best plain salt bread of the trip, below Jayeondo.

The strawberry and cream bun is doused in icing sugar and sticky sweet. It’s topped with fresh strawberries and filled with thick whipped cream and more chopped strawberries. I end up with a nose covered in icing sugar and a coat covered in cream. It’s my favourite bun so far. 

Day six: Avek Cheri, Yongsan District, Seoul

Order: Original salt bread and red bean butter-filled salt bread

Avek Cheri follows the trend of Onion and Artist in that it’s built for Instagram. Avek Cheri’s mascot is a line-drawn bird. Its slogan (in English) is “Pass me a slice of that bread, will ya?”

The plain bun tastes more croissant-y than other plain breads, and it’s topped with visible salt flakes. It’s definitely in the top three for the plain variety.

It’s when I get to the red bean and butter bread that things go wrong. I cannot stress how much butter there is in this bread. It’s like a full ice-cream scoop of red bean paste to a full scoop of soft and slippery butter. The two are totally separate and unmixable. I accidentally eat most of it in one sitting.

I feel ill as I browse a shop. I feel ill in the Uber to Seoul Forest Park. I feel ill as we walk through packed Saturday crowds. Noting a glassy look of panic in my eyes, my partner points out a bathroom but, with the crowd, there’s no way I’ll make it. While people have their eyes glued to petals falling from the sky, I quietly vomit into a bush. A new low! 

Day seven: Convenience store, Seoul

Order: Salt bread snacks

Yesterday’s experience took me out of action and I’m scared to dip a toe back into the butter pool and risk being incapacitated for my final day in Seoul. 

Instead, I dive into convenience store salt bread-inspired snacks. They’re bagged and sold in the chip aisle. I buy two. They both make me want another salt bread. I’ve learnt nothing.

This story is part of Broadsheet’s special Travel Issue, presented by Commonwealth Bank and Travel Booking via the CommBank app.