Today we’re going to show you how to make a traditional Chinese Green Bean Soup, a sweet dessert soup made with nutritious mung beans. You need only 4 ingredients, easy to find at your local Asian grocery store. If you’ve never tried sweet soups, you’ll be delighted!
But wait, did we say soup for dessert? That’s right! In China, there is a huge variety of delicious sweet soups, called tong sui, which literally means “sugar water”. Served hot in winter or cold in summer, these soups are typically enjoyed as a dessert in Cantonese cuisine, but are also enjoyed at breakfast, at teatime, or with dim sum.
Tong sui soups can be made with a variety of ingredients, such as red adzuki beans, black sesame, rice, eggs, or almonds. But for today’s recipe, we’ve chosen to use the delicious mung beans, also known as green beans in China. Mung beans are small, olive-green legumes that are widely used in Asian cuisine in both sweet and savory dishes.
In addition to mung beans, you will also need seaweed, tangerine peel, and a sweetener of your choice. Kelp is a type of dried seaweed that you use to make the dashi stock for miso soup. In the following steps we will show you how to prepare kelp and use it in the soup to add a wonderful umami flavor.
As for the tangerine, you can opt for the traditional dried tangerine peel or use the fresh one, as we did. Chinese dessert soups typically use rock candy as a sweetener. It consists of large sugar crystals made from a solution of sugar and water. Since it’s a little tricky to find, we made our recipe with brown sugar, which is more accessible instead. You can also use white sugar, honey, maple syrup, or golden syrup if you like.
What makes this Chinese Mung Bean Soup so unique is the combination of sweet, lemony and savory notes. And you even get a nice boost of protein from the beans, all things considered 220 calories per bowl. Impressively!