Red Bean Soup (hoong dau shui) forms a part of Chinese's snack or dessert staple. Every Chinese household would have their mothers or grandmothers cooking a big pot of this to be enjoyed as snack or dessert especially when they're frying a batch of bee hoon (zhau mai fun, rice vermicelli). They also tend to appear in parties and yes, you would see the big tray of zhau mai fun on the table too!
Red Bean Soup is Capt'n Hook's favourite tong shui (sweet), simple but yet yummilicious. I've done Red & Kidney Beans Sweet Soup and Cream of Red Bean (hoong dau sar). Here's another version of Red Bean Soup. This version contains lotus seeds.
To make this, prepare dried lotus seeds by soaking them in warm water until the seeds got rehydrated. Proceed to split the seeds and remove the yellowish greenish stems as these stems will caused the seeds to taste bitter. Once done, you can boil or steam them till soften and set aside.
In the meantime, wash the red beans until water runs clear, remember to rub them in between your two palms as the beans can be rather dirty. You can soak the beans in warm water for about 20 mins but it's fine if you don't.
Boil the red beans in a large pot, uncovered (unless your pot is very tall else the content will spill), with about 2 times water of the height of the beans with low heat. Keep checking, add more hot water if it dries out too much. Once the red bean turned soft, add more hot water until your desired consistency, we liked ours half water, half beans proportion. Proceed to add in some brown rock sugar (or you can use normal sugar) and some washed and drained sago pearls. I loved my Red Bean Soup with sago pearls as it thicken and smooten the soup texture. Add in the lotus seeds. Let it come to a slow boil and cook until the sago pearls turn clear. Turn off the heat and serve Red Bean Soup hot or chilled.
We loved this soup by dunking in yau char kwai (Chinese crullers) or soak the yau char kwai pieces inside the hot sweet soup. Good enough as an afternoon snack or at times for our breakie.
BTW, anyone tried making this using a pressure cooker? I tried a couple of times but both times I have the beans spilling out of the errrr watchacalldatthingamagik (valve??) and I could see reddish smoke coming out there too!
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hi, sorry for my late reply. thanks for ur wishes. life being a dad is nice for me thou is tiring. baby and mummy both doing fine. will try my best to blog too.
ReplyDeletehow come the tong sui got the fried stuff...i cant remember call wat liow...
congrats again vialentino :D now eating confinement food eh?? kekeke nice or not?
ReplyDeletethose are yau char kwai, you never tried eating this with yau char kwai???
yups, i alws use the pressure cooker!
ReplyDeleteAnd yes got water comin out of the valve if there was too much water added.
However, u got to be careful how muhc water to put in else its dangerous..
new way of having this red bean soup?! first time seeing having yau char koay with red bean. :)
ReplyDeleteEnjoy a good thick and sweet bowl of 'tong sui' anytime anywhere. I have used the pressure cooker for a few years and usually don't put any beans and cereals in it unless the portion is really small. The beans breaks up in pieces and those pieces can clog up the valve and my manual posted a warning of the dangers of a clogged valve!
ReplyDeleteSame as New Kid on the Blog, I've never seen red bean soup eaten with yao char kway. Cooked it quite often here, with sago sometimes, like it a lot.
ReplyDeleteTNG, mine is not water that came out leh :(
ReplyDeleteNKOTB & sugar bean, hmm but I've been eating like this since I was a kid wor :P
worldwindows, i've done black bean soup beautifully, maybe it's harder but not successfully with red beans. errr mine came from India and a lot of beans and lentils recipes in the book leh!
;-) kong kay. there are quite a nuumber of tong shui stall have yau char kwai options
ReplyDelete