K-Recipes: Bingsoo Rice Cake!

Hey guys! Today I’m back with another post- this time, about food :D Since it’s summertime, I know that a lot of people are trying to cool down by eating popsicles, but personally I prefer BINGSOO!

Bingsoo (빙수), also known as patbingsoo (팥빙수), is a popular Korean dessert that comes in a bowl with shaved ice, red beans, condensed milk, rice cake (떡), and more! Look out for an upcoming post about my bingsoo recipe with some tips and tricks, but for today, I will be teaching you guys how to make the rice cake that goes in the bingsoo. :)

Ingredients/Tools needed:

1/2 cup sweet rice flour

nearly 1/2 cup distilled water

1 bowl

1 spoon

Corn starch

saran wrap

Cutting board/any flat surface

Small knife

Optional:

sugar/sweetener of choice to taste

I was first forced to make this when my local Korean supermarket ran out of their bingsoo style rice cake T^T. I thought I was screwed, but alas- my mom came to the rescue :D

This recipe is pretty self explanatory, and is SUPER easy as long as you have the ingredients. Sweet rice flour can be easily found at any supermarket/asian supermarket, but if you can’t find it or want the easy way out, it should also be available on stores like Amazon. Link to the one I have here! :)

First, measure out the sweet rice flour and place it in a bowl.Then, slowly mix in the distilled water bit by bit. You don’t have to do this, but I find that if you dump all the water in at once, it can get a little hard to mix and gets easier to spill over. I also like to do it slowly just so I make sure that I don’t add too much water and mess up the recipe :)

When you’re mixing it, it should form little clumps as shown here.

Keep mixing until you get this:

Afterwards, cover up the bowl with saran wrap, making sure to leave a little hole so it doesn’t explode D:

Once you’ve done all that, simply place the bowl in the microwave and let it run for a minute. Take it out and “mix” it with a spoon (it should be a little hard to mix-it should be more like flipping and squishing it around- but thats normal). Make sure to be careful because it can get hot..I use gloves because I’m a scaredy cat :D

When you take it out of the microwave for the first time, you should notice that some parts of the mixture have little white sections, and others have changed colors. The white sections are the uncooked parts! The whole reason of “mixing” here is so that the whole thing cooks evenly.

After you’ve mixed it, recover and let it run in the microwave for another 30 seconds.

**Keep in mind that every microwave is different, and that you might have to run it for more or less, but it should be similar to what I had for mine. Just keep an eye on it~

This time, it was really hot when I took it out T^T BE CAREFUL PEOPLEEEE

It should look like this after two microwave increments:

Take off that saran wrap and let that bowl aside to cool for a little bit while you get out your cutting board and spread some corn starch on it. You can use any flat surface, but I prefer to use a cutting board because 1. you need to cut the rice cake and 2. I like to control the mess :). The corn starch is used so that the rice cake doesn’t stick to EVERY SINGLE THING EVER so don’t use it sparingly..spread that sh*t everywhere.

Yeeee, here comes the fun part: take the rice cake and plop it down on the cutting board, making sure to be careful because IT IS HOT OK?!

I usually cut it into big pieces and let it cool down before I start the next step, because I can’t touch it if it’s burning my fingers off.

When it’s warm to the touch, mash all the pieces together and spread it on the cutting board like this. If it starts to stick, corn starch on your hands helps :D

Afterwards, cut the rice cake into long strips, making sure to spread corn starch on your small knife because it WILL stick! Feel free to coat your knife before each cut, because thats what I did :)

Finally, just cut it up into little cube-y shapes, coating each side with corn starch as you cut, and you're done :D

These little rice cakes can be stored in a ziplock bag in the freezer, or can be eaten as soon as you're done!~ If you store them in the fridge, they will can hard and chalky after around 5-7 days, so if you're going to make a batch in advance, then storage in the freezer is the way to go.

Before you eat them/plan to put them in the bingsoo, just pop them out into a small bowl and let them thaw out for 5 minutes while you shave the ice and prep the other ingredients.

Hope this was helpful ^_^ Until next time,

Susie

#recipes #dessert