Name: Healthy 4-Ingredient Green Bean Dessert Soup
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 20 min
Ingredients: 200 g mung beans; 1000 ml water; Juice of half a lemon; Rock sugar (adjust to taste)

Jump to Recipe Jump to Video Print Recipe

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure policy.

Looking for something sweet and soupy? Try green bean soup, a Chinese soup dessert made with only 4 simple ingredients. You can make sweet soup using only green beans, water, lemon juice, and rock sugar. Serve it warm or chilled at any time of the day.

What Is Green Bean Dessert Soup?

Green bean soup is made with green beans (綠豆) or mung beans. It is different from other common vegetables, green beans, also known as French beans, string beans, and snap beans. Mung beans are legumes that are round seeds that can be green, yellow, brown, or black.

Similar to the more renowned red bean soup, green bean dessert soup is a versatile dish commonly enjoyed as both a savory vegetable soup and a sweet dessert.

If eaten as a sweet dessert soup, you can eat it warm or chilled. Green beans are favored for their highly nutritious content, containing a high amount of fiber, protein, vitamins, and minerals such as iron and magnesium.

Mung beans are regarded as a cold or cooling ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which is excellent in reducing heat from the body. In this recipe, we will cook green beans with water, lemon juice, and rock sugar. It is as simple as soaking, freezing, and boiling the green beans.

Ingredient Alternatives To Green Bean Dessert Soup

Let’s take a closer look at each ingredient. In this part, I further explain the type of ingredient to use, tips, and alternative suggestions. Check out my suggestions below to make this dish your own customized version.

Green beans– Use whole dried green mung beans. Whole beans still have their skin or hulls. If you don’t have whole mung beans, you can use split mung beans, which I use to make mung bean paste and mung bean cake. Preparing mung beans requires soaking and boiling them. If you skip the soaking process, you will need to allow for more cooking time, as demonstrated in my recipe for Mung Bean Popsicles.
Lemon juice– In this recipe, I used the juice of a half lemon. You can also use lemon juice sold in bottles, but make sure you buy unsweetened ones. One regular lemon typically contains about two to three tablespoons of juice. You can follow the same amount for bottled lemon juices.
Rock sugar– Rock sugar is a common ingredient in Chinese cuisine, whether it is for a savory dish or a sweet dessert. It is a crystallized sugar made from unprocessed sugar cane. Its sweetness is milder than granulated sugar. It is more diluted than granulated sugar since it is made from water and sugar. If you don’t have rock sugar, you can swap it for white sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, or coconut sugar.
Optional add-on ingredients– If you want to get creative and add more flavors and textures, you can add these ingredients:
- Coconut milk
- Gingko nuts
- Ginger
- Kelp
- Lotus seeds
- Pandan leaves
- Sago pearls
- Salt
- Tangerine peel

What You Need To Make Green Bean Dessert Soup

Make this recipe with only a cooking pot for boiling. You will also need to prepare a bowl to soak the beans and put them in the freezer.

Here is the list of ingredients you need:

200g mung beans
1000ml water
Juice of half a lemon
Rock sugar (adjust to taste)

How To Make Green Bean Dessert Soup

Cooking the beans takes about 30 minutes. However, the entire recipe will need more than two hours since you will have to soak and freeze the beans. Watch my tutorial video on Instagram and TikTok to see how I did it.

Boil water in a pot. Once it boils, pour the boiled water over the green beans in a heat-resistant bowl.

Soak the green beans in boiling water for 10 minutes.

Let the water cool.

After cooling, freeze the beans for two hours. Freezing the beans after soaking enhances the texture and flavor. This step makes the beans softer and tender. Moreover, it also helps preserve the color and nutrients.

After two hours, take it out and put it in the casserole.

Then, add 1000ml of water.

Cover the pot and cook until it boils.

Next, add the juice of half a lemon. The lemon juice helps to make it greener.

Add rock sugar and adjust to taste. Cover and boil for another 10 minutes.

Serve the soup either warm or cold after chilling in the refrigerator on hot summer days. I prefer chilled green bean soup since it tastes better when refrigerated!