I haven’t seen any treat like this anywhere else. Patbingsu 팥빙수 (or “Popping Sue” to foreigners) is a Korean summertime treat, that, in my mind, divides ice cream into all its separate elements and throws it back together minus the eggs.
It’s a simple concept, really. It’s shaved ice topped with sweetened red beans (the “pat”), fruit (usually canned, jellied, or dried), syrup, ddeok (chewy rice cakes), and milk (fresh or condensed). Now, that’s not how each patbingsu is made. Giving a concrete official ingredient list of patbingsu is like giving an official ingredient list to an ice cream sundae. It depends on who’s serving it and the taste of the customer. Some varieties get pretty far out there. I’ve heard of creamed corn being thrown on there.
Like Bibimbap, you take this concoction and stir it until the individual components are unrecognizable.
This is another one of those dishes that creates emphatic divided opinions amongst people. Eun Jeong absolutely loves it. Others hate it. I personally — well, I’d take an ice cream over Popping Sue, but if it’s put in front of me, I’d enjoy it. I’m one of those foreigners who actually likes the sweetened red beans. It’s the shaved ice with milk that turns me off.
I think it reminds me of a bad experiment I made with the Snoopy Sno-Cone Makertm when I was a kid.
