Mung Bean Soup 绿豆汤

Summer in a pot

Where red bean soup is winter's dessert, mung bean soup is summer's medicine that happens to be dessert. Small green beans simmered until they just split, barely sweetened, then chilled — cloudy jade broth, soft beans, and the particular relief of something cold that isn't sugar water. Street stalls ladle it through every Chinese heatwave; my pot goes on the moment Xiao Hu starts sleeping in the shade with his paws in the air, which is a more reliable thermometer than the one on the wall.

What tradition says

The mung bean is the food-therapy pantry's flagship cooling food: clearing summer-heat and "toxins," the traditional first aid poured for heat rash, prickly restlessness, and long days in the sun — the August pillar of seasonal eating. The old herbals even used mung bean broth as a folk antidote taken alongside harsh medicines. All of that is the tradition speaking, clearly labeled.

What research says

The bean has a genuine research literature — reviews catalog antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and blood-sugar-related activity in its abundant polyphenols, plus a documented knack for binding certain heavy metals, the kernel of truth inside the old antidote lore^[1]. Almost all of it is lab and animal work: promising chemistry, no proven soup. What is beyond argument is the nutrition — a legume's protein and fiber served ice-cold in a heatwave, hydrating people who would otherwise be drinking syrup.

Xing Po's method

One cup mung beans, rinsed, six cups water. Simmer thirty to forty minutes — stop when the first beans split; cook on and you get (perfectly good) porridge. Sweeten faintly with rock sugar or a monk fruit quarter; a few dried lily bulb petals or a sprig of mint if the day is truly cruel. Chill.

The northern trick: simmer the beans with a strip of kombu-like kelp and serve the broth alone as a drink. The southern trick: keep the beans and call it dessert. This kitchen is diplomatically bilingual.

One sensible note

"Cooling" is a kitchen word, not a fever treatment — a sick child needs a doctor, not a bean. And anyone with a delicate stomach should drink it cool rather than icy; even summer relief has manners.

Reviewed 2026-08-26