Pat bing soo

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Pat bing soo

Hangul	팥빙수
Hanja	팥 氷水
Revised Romanization	patbingsu
McCune-Reischauer	patpingsu

Patbingsu or pat bing soo is a very popular snack/dessert in Korea, especially during the sweltering and humid summer season. Westerners might recognize this dessert as an East Asian variation on the snow cone.

Lotteria offers an elaborate version with ice cream

This snack is composed of ice shavings and sweetened red beans (known as 팥, or pat). It initially began as a mixture of hand shaved ice and sweetened red beans.^[1] It was sold by street vendors. These days it has become a very elaborate summer dessert, often topped with ice cream or frozen yogurt, sweetened condensed milk, fruit syrups, various fruits such as strawberries, kiwifruit, and bananas, small pieces of tteok (rice cake), chewy jelly bits, and cereal flakes. Some vendors add cherry tomatoes as cherry tomatoes are generally considered a fruit in South Korea.

1 Variations
2 Availability
3 Eating
4 Reference
5 See also

[edit] Variations

Bing soos are available in different flavors. Green tea and coffee are popular variations. For the summer 2007 season, Starbucks Korea has recently released a pat bing soo-inspired frappuccino.^[2]

[edit] Availability

Note the lack of ice cream but a cherry tomato topping in this version

Pat bing soo is a summer specialty item found on the menus of most fast food restaurants in South Korea. KFC, McDonald's, Lotteria, and Burger King usually carry pat bing soo on their menus from May to September. The ice cream/yogurt chains Ice Berry and Red Mango carry it year round.

Pat bing soo is also a very popular dessert at cafés in Los Angeles' Koreatown. In particular, Ice Kiss^[3] is a popular destination, where people can be found eating pat bing soo with all the aforementioned toppings throughout the night ^[4].

[edit] Eating

Fans of pat bing soo have different methods of eating. Some are "mixers" and immediately mix all the toppings into the base of ice and pat before eating.^[5] Others are serial eaters, eating each topping in succession. There is also a hybrid style where one starts as a serial eater and then after sampling each topping, the eater mixes the remaining toppings.