Here are all of the places you may expect to find beans: on a Mexican plate lunch, blanketed in cheese and adjoining to enchiladas and rice; swimming in a pool of chili; or candy-and-salty and piled on toast the way Brits and Aussies select within the AM. But beans, more regularly than not, are neglected for a meal. They shine in the desert. Growing up, I spent most of my weekends at the local Thai temple, where it became recurring for me to shop for a bowl of sticky mung bean pudding glazed with salted coconut milk to cap off my Thai instructions. The dessert, called tau suan in Thai, is likewise served in Singapore and China, in which it’s miles every so often used as a dip for Chinese crullers or speckled with crunchy water chestnuts.
Mung beans are versatile and present in some other Thai desserts. There’s luk chup, a mung bean confection shaped like traditional Thai culmination and greens and sealed in a shiny gelatin glaze. There’s also Khanom mo Kaeng tua, a baked mung bean custard comparable to flan crowned with savory fried shallots. The yellow beans also find themselves in Vietnamese the bau mau, a parfait-like dessert with ice, coconut milk, pandan jelly, and every other superstar within the global dessert beans: crimson beans.
Red beans, now and then called adzuki beans, are distinguished in Japanese and Chinese cakes. It can be made into a paste, called Anko in Japanese, filled in mochi and moon cakes, or slathered between sweet pancakes in a dessert known as dorayaki. In the Philippines, it’s protected in shaved ice sundaes — alongside flan, scoops of use, cost, out ice cream, and coconut– known as halo-halo.
