In the Malaysian confectionery Kuih Cafe In midtown Manhattan, baker Veronica Gan, in her 50s, sells ang ku kueh, a pliable, toothy ruby-red mochi shaped like a turtle shell. The mochi itself has little flavor—its delights are textures—but bite into the sweet and you find it’s stuffed with sweet mung bean paste. Starchy, subtly nutty and slightly sweet, it lingers on the tongue.
The mung bean (Vigna radiata) was probably first domesticated in India about 4,000 years ago, before spreading from South Asia to Southeast Asia and then north to China. Each bean is about one-fifth of an inch long and grows from the plant in thin, hairy pods that grow from yellow (or sometimes purple) orchid-like flowers. In Asia, the mung bean—whether boiled, sprouted, or ground into flour—is as fundamental and versatile as rice. It is used in both savory and sweet dishes, although it is particularly beloved in traditional desserts such as the Indian moong dal halwa, a buttery porridge often spiced with saffron and cardamom, and the Korean injeolmi, sticky rice cakes rolled in crushed nuts.
Although common across the continent, the mung bean has been slow to catch on in the West – particularly in its sweet form. Part of that is the difference in taste: Asian sweets tend to be less sweet and favor the dense, chewy ingredients—adzuki beans, chickpeas, lotus root—that Westerners generally associate with savory foods. But now, a new generation of Asian-American chefs are creating new interpretations of the traditional mung bean desserts they ate as children. Thu Pham Buser, 32, a New York-based stylist and chef who grew up in Ho Chi Minh City (whose old name, Saigon, remains popular), recalls bánh đầu xanh trái cây — thimble-sized candies shaped like oranges, mangosteens or cherries, molded from bean paste and dyed with food coloring — as a fixture of her youth. As she rode on the back of her father’s motorcycle, she says, “salesmen would put themselves up at red lights and try to make eye contact, because they knew kids just couldn’t resist.” Buser started making them and posting photos on her Instagram as part of her mission to promote Vietnamese delicacies to a wider Western audience. She plans to serve them at her pop-up Vietnamese dinner line, Ăn Cỗ, this spring.
In Long Beach, California, the vegan Filipino pop-up San & Wolves Bakeshop, founded by Kym Estrada, 32, offers pan de monggo, a soft milk bread stuffed with a yellow mung bean filling that replaces cow’s butter with a homemade coconut oil base. Last fall, Rachel Law33, a chef who shares Chinese American recipes on TikTok, posted a recipe for snowskin mooncakes: He updated the Chinese classic, which is usually served in autumn for the Moon Festival and is made of a white glutinous rice wrapper filled with mung bean paste, for a version with a pastel marbled exterior and a pandan-flavored mung bean filling.
Lauren Tran, 34, baker who runs the Vietnamese American pop-up Bánh by Lauren in New York, she develops her take on chè bưởi, a pure pomelo-rind soup thickened with tapioca starch and topped with a coconut sauce, in which steamed beans float like stars. She also makes a five-layer version of bánh da hạn, a sticky rice cake created by steaming sticky layers of pale green pandan and yellow mung bean batters. She remembers the cake from her childhood in Seattle, where it was sold in strips on Styrofoam plates at Vietnamese grocery stores. Eating it was a delightful, gooey mess. Tran, however, wraps bite-sized pieces of the cake in cellophane to resemble party favors. “It’s very nostalgic for me,” says Tran, but “you don’t have to be Vietnamese or speak Vietnamese fluently to relate to it.”