Mung Bean Soup

Mung beans, or some call it green beans here, the direct ranslation from Kacang hijau or 禄豆.
Being Malaysians… we love our desserts laced with the fragrance of pandan… which differs it from our pre-migration ancestors.

My brother is one of those who can’t take mung beans. It evokes his asthma. Chinese says the mung bean is cooling to the body, and one of my friend, Candy Soo, told me, to boil this for 7 hours if u want to get rid of the cooling effect. 7 hours! Kill me, but do that if u want, in a slow cooker.

This mung bean soup uses palm sugar as one of its sweeteners….
Palm sugar + coconut milk = heavenly
And u may substitute the coconut milk here with evaporated milk/creamer, if u have probs with that nutty white extract.

I’m trying to stop all the guesstimation when cooking now….especially when it comes to desserts.

I’ve found that to make 1L of this soup, I need 100gm. Today I used 200gm, so I made 2L of it. Mung beans cook much faster than red beans, so it need not be soaked.

You may substitute the pandan fragrance by using 1 or 2 drops of vanilla.

200gm mung beans

2L water

Few blades of pandan, washed , torn into shreds, and tied into a knot.

100gm palm sugar

120gm sugar

½ cup thick coconut extract (abt ½ coconut)

My Pandan leaves are all wrinkled,
dried out in the fridge, but it's still usable.

1. Bing water to a boil, rinse mung beans and put them together with pandan knot into the boiling water.

2. Cover pot and simmer on low heat for 2 hours.

3. Bring it to high heat for 15 minutes, pot uncovered. Be there to watch. You might need to add some water if the water is greatly reduced.

4. Put in palm sugar and cook until it is completed melted. Taste and adjust with sugar according to preference.

5. Turn off heat and leave pot uncovered for 5 minutes. Put in coconut milk and stir.

6. Serve chilled or warm.

Bringing it to high heat for the last 15 minutes will bring out the starch in the bean, thus making the soup thicker w/o having too much beans in it.

You may put in tapioca/sago pearls in it if u want it even thicker. 2 Tablespoons is sufficient. But I find that when chilled, this soup will be way too thick with tapioca pearls. Don’t forget that mung beans contains starch of their own, unlike red beans/adzuki.