Shaved Ice 剉冰

剉冰 - tsua-bing, is a shaved ice dessert very common in Taiwan street vendors. It is especially popular during the hot summer months and is super inexpensive. Depending on which vendor you buy from or which county you're in, the highest price you can pay is maybe 50 NT (though highly unlikely, it is more so around 40 NT, which is roughly equivalent to a little more than 1 dollar in the US) to 20 NT, barely a dollar.

剉冰 has a consistency similar to Italian ice, but sometimes less fine and a little more course. Though, of course, the flavors and toppings are very different. 

It can be served in a cup to eat on the go while shopping or it can be served in a large bowl to share with friends.The bowls I've seen used can be as big as the ones you get for noodle soup, filled with a huge mound of ice and countless toppings.

A variety a toppings can be sold and chosen. The most simple is just to put sugarcane juice to give a mild sweet flavoring or to put a darker colored syrup. Nowadays most people like to have a number of toppings used. You can get strawberries, mangoes, watermelon, red beans, mung beans, vermicelli, Chinese pudding/Bu Ding, grass jelly, tapioca balls (boba/bubbles), pineapple, taroroot, lotus seeds, all sorts! It is kind of like a buffet, you pick and choose your toppings and then pay for a set price.

There are some combinations that are already decided, such as "Eight Treasure Ice" 八寶冰 | bābǎobīng, the 8 ingredients used differs from vendor to vendor, but usually have: taro, azuki beans, mung beans, yams, sweetened peanuts, and grass jelly. 

Condensed milk and cane syrup is sometimes poured over the 剉冰 to add more sweetness. The condense milk can also make the ice thicker and have a richer taste like ice-cream.

My personal favorite combinations are either:

1. strawberries, sweetened condensed milk, mangoes, and azuki beans

or

2. sugarcane syrup, mung beans, taroroot, grass jelly, azuki beans, vermicelli

Number 1 is something I am more likely to get in a city setting. Number 2 is what my grandmother would always get us when the days were especially hot. She would drive out on her moped and get us 20 NT worth of a huge bag filled with ice and toppings, pouring it out into a bowl for us to devour when she got home. Most of the ice (except for a few chunks here and there) would already melt due the intensity of the heat but no one would complain because it would still be nice and cool to stave off the heat of the day. :)

剉冰 with sweetened condense milk, strawberries, cherries, and I'm going to say that the orange ball on top is either mango ice-cream or a scoop of mango

The red beans on the top/side are azuki beans, the light purple chunks on the bottom are taroroot, there's some mango chunks here and there, grass jelly on the left hiding under the green chunks (I don't know what they are), mung bean hiding in the back left, and mini boba's (tapioca balls) under some mango and taroroot chunks

This is a simple 剉冰 with just the syrup which is equally good :)

Dream Mall - Kaohsiung

The Dream Mall is literally out of this world just as its name suggests. It is kind of like the Taiwanese version of the King of Prussia Mall for those of you who have been there before.

Dream Mall is located in Kaohsiung, Taiwan (southern part of Taiwan and the second largest city). It is the largest shopping mall in Taiwan and the largest in East Asia. It is built and operated by Tungcheng Development Corporation a subsidiary of Uni-President Enterprises Corporation. It opened on May 12, 2007, and contains restaurants, movie theater, gym, and entertainment including a rooftop amusement park, and of course, many, many, many stores to shop in. The rooftop amusement park at Dream Mall is home to the Kaohsiung Eye ferris wheel.

When I was in Kaohsiung, we took the underground railway to the closest stop near Dream Mall. From there, there are shuttle buses every 10 minutes to take you to the Dream Mall.

The place is ridiculously enormous with twelve floors. You could spend your whole day shopping at Dream Mall and still not finish. I think my cousins and I nearly got lost in the mall due to the immensity of it all!

Each floor has its own theme. The fifth floor is for things related to children's goods.  The sixth floor is for fitness and outdoor recreation. One of the lower floors is all brand name goods. And if memory serves me right, one of the floors is dedicated to young adults/teenagers. 

The food court was especially large with a variety of foods to chose from. When I went, I didn't buy too many things because this particular mall is an upscale, first-class type of mall. Majority of the stores were high-end stores like Gucci, Prada, Guess, and a lot of other brand names I have never heard of. Many stores were European fashion stores. So to actually go to shop there is very expensive, but it is fun to see and experience. 

That isn't to say, however, that there are not any stores where middle class patrons cannot shop at, you just have to go/find to the right section of the mall (though even then, I still didn't buy anything >.<).

There are many unique stores and restaurants inside the mall that I would recommend seeing. I know there was this one store that was dimly lit and had rows of shoe racks that lit up in white. And get this, the racks would move left and right! It was very cool! 

Dou Hua | 豆花

Dòu Huā (豆花), dou fu hua (豆腐花), tofu pudding, or soybean pudding  is a Chinese dessert made with very soft tofu. There are many variants depending on the country, because everyone makes it differently. But for me, my personal favorite is the Taiwanese version. In Taiwan, dou hua is served with sweet toppings like cooked peanuts, adzuki beans, tapioca, mung beans, and flavored with sweet ginger syrup or almond syrup. During the summer, douhua is served cold; in the winter, it is served warm. I personally like my dou hua simple, with cooked peanuts in it and flavored with almond syrup and a tint of sweet ginger.
I have also even seen dou hua with soy bean milk as the base.

It's a nice, light dessert to have in the summer when the weather is hot and you want to have something cool, yet light. It also isn't too sweet to ruin your appetite either. Dou hua is usually sold by side street vendors. It is served in a simple cup (like the kind you get from frozen yogurt stores). Dou hua is one of my many well-loved foods I enjoy while over in Taiwan :). But if you're also ever in the Flushing Queens New York area or in any China towns, I'm sure some variant of dou hua would be available for you to try too!

Bubble Tea | 珍珠奶茶

Bubble tea, bubble milk tea, pearl milk tea, boba milk tea, or just boba, is a popular drink in today's Taiwanese culture. It is drink invented in tea shops in Taichung, Taiwan, during the 1980s. As you can probably guess, bubble tea is a tea based drink and is usually mixed with fruit or milk. It comes in hot and cold versions and almost always has marble sized, chewy, black tapioca balls. They're called "pearls" (珍珠 zhēnzhū) or "boba" (波霸, bōbà) hence where the other names come from. The bubbles or pearls don't really have a taste, it is added more so for a texture of chewy-ness sensation. Though sometimes some shops do soak the pearls in honey or sugar water. 

Evolution of Bubble Tea:
Since bubble tea's popularity, many new inventions and variations have come into being, along with a huge expanse of flavors.

Bubble tea has two types: fruit-flavored teas and milk teas.Some shops do offer hybrid "fruit milk teas" too. Most milk teas include powdered dairy or non-dairy creamers, but some nicer shops use fresh milk. The nicer shops also use 100% fruit instead of the powder.

The oldest known bubble tea consisted of a mixture of hot Taiwanese black tea, small tapioca balls, condensed milk, and syrup or honey. Sometimes they use just use sweetened condense milk to replace the last two ingredients in one go.The regular bubble tea has a coffee color.

The tea base is now often replaced. First was bubble green tea, which uses jasmine green tea (茉香綠茶) instead of black tea. Big tapioca balls were used and replaced the small ones. Then more fruit flavors were added until, in some drinks, fruit flavor replaced the tea.  Flavors may be added in the form of powder, fruit juice, pulp, or syrup to black or green tea, which is then shaken in a cocktail shaker or mixed with ice in a blender. Cooked tapioca balls and other mix-ins (such as honey, syrup, and sugar) are added at the end.

Now there are fruity, flowery, or tea flavors available. Common flavors include mango, lychee, strawberry, taro root  rose, and lavender.

Some cafes use plastic dome-shaped lids (like the type you get with icees or slushies), but most in Taiwan that I've seen use a machine to seal the top of the cup with plastic cellophane (pretty much just a plastic covering). This lets the workers shake up the tea and makes it spill-free. To drink, you just need to stab your super sized straw (for the tapioca) through the plastic and voila, it is ready to drink. 

Typical bubble tea shop

Today, you can find shops entirely devoted to bubble tea all over Taiwan, but also in Flushing Queens New York and Chinatowns in all cities.

Original Milk Tea

Note: For children and the elderly it is best to be careful when drinking the tapioca balls, there have been instances where they have become a choking hazard. So it is best to drink bubble tea slowly and with care :)