Pat-Bing-Soo

Strawberry Pat-Bing-Soo

          Pat-bing-soo or pat-bing-su is a Korean shaved ice that can be personalized in many ways.  This particular pat-sing-soo that I tried, was a strawberry pat-bing-soo from Caffe Bene in Times Square.  Pat-bing-soo usually contains red beans (the "pat" in pat-bing-soo), but I'm not a big fan of red beans so my order was red-bean-less. Although there were no red beans in this dessert, it still had a lot of flavor and sweetness and I thought it was pretty delicious. Pat-bing-soo was new to me, but in the past, I have had two types of Taiwanese shaved ice.  In comparison, the pat-bing-soo was much creamier and the toppings were different too.  With Taiwanese shaved ice, I always had grass jelly, tapioca etc. as toppings, but for this pat-bing-soo, there were strawberries, strawberry syrup, strawberry ice cream, and milk included in the order as toppings.  Another difference between pat-bing-soo and Taiwanese shaved ice is the milk used.  For Taiwanese shaved ice, it is more common to use sweetened condensed milk, but for pat-bing-soo, regular milk is used.  I have also never had shaved ice with ice cream before, so this was new to me.  I would reccomend this dessert as something to try, but if you are going, bring a friend!  It's a really large bowl!!