Sweet Green Bean Soup with Coconut & Sago

One of the main joys of a mahjong soirée is an opportunity to cook and eat favorite foods from my childhood days in Hong Kong.  And sweet soup—糖水 “tong shui” (literally “sugar water”)—is one of them.

Given the wave of hot spring weather in San Francisco recently last week, I decided to make some 綠豆沙 sweet green bean (mung) soup to help dissipate the “heatiness.”

Clockwise from far right: green (mung) beans, tapioca (sago) pearls, lotus seeds, and dried tangerine peels and ginger.

By the way, the ingredients and cooking method is very similar to red bean soup.  But personally, I add coconut milk and tapioca pearls only to green bean soup as they tend to add a tropical and lighter texture that I like for a “chilling” soup.  (If you follow traditional Chinese medical philosophy, ladies may want to avoid this “cooling” soup during that time of the month.)

This is what lily bulbs look like, for easy reference!

I love my “tong shui” hot, but they are great chilled as well.  Just add a splash of milk or soy if eating after chilling as the soup may thicken or even congeal considerably.

There are many variations on this sweet soup recipe.  One I’d like to try is wiffy the Noob Cook’s recipe, which uses pandan leaves and gingko nuts.  Her tapioca to green bean ratio is a bit higher than mine—play with it, and see what your personal preference is.  

By the way, Wiffy has a great photo-by-photo post on how to cook tapioca (sago) pearls, for those who want some extra help on this.  Cooking tapioca through the center without “melting” the pearls into one big glob can be a challenge, but if you follow her easy instructions, it will be cake!

Not sure if I can say perfect, but these tapioca pearls are much better than the “glob” I used to get when I first started making them!

My dear hubby would never accept Chinese sweet soups as “real dessert,” so I only make them for myself.  I love them as a post-run protein snack—run it in the blender, and the soup will be transformed into a tropical-themed protein shake!

A snapshot of the recipe

Click here for a larger download-able version.

Ingredients for the filling The dough is ready 15 minutes to make this 1 wrapper! Pretty little dumplings

I want to perfect my homemade dumplings.  I decided that first, it would require that I make my own wrappers instead of using store-bought ones.  

3 afternoons and 12+ hours later, I finally got my rolling down so my wrappers are in almost-perfect circles, with thin edges and a slightly thicker center.  I am proud to get my time down to 3.5 minutes per dumpling (to roll wrapper and pleat dumpling), but that is still only 17 dumplings for every hour—that doesn’t include the time to make the filling and the dough. 

Verdict?  It is a meditative and rewarding experience, to sit and roll and wrap.  But there’s still much work and practice to be done to get the skin to taste better than my favorite store-bought one (it’s a Japanese brand of gyoza wrappers).  Next time, I might try using bread flour instead.

Interested? Here are 3 of the best dumpling skin resources I found after much searching.

The Daring Kitchen

This one’s the most thorough and helpful overall if you’d like instructions on everything you need to make a dumpling, from the filling to the wrapper to final cooking.

Use Real Butter

This one’s from the same blogger (Jen), with plenty more details, photos and instructions on how to make the wrapper. It took me a while to understand her rolling advice, but when I finally got it, it really made all the difference in achieving that perfectly circular shape.

The Little Teochew

I used this blogger, Ju’s, dough recipe for making the wrappers, in hopes the salt and oil would make the wrappers yummier.