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Mung Beans: A Shoot in the Dark

Mung beans can show up on a menu as a sprout, a legume, or even a noodle. To learn how these morsels shift shapes, read on.

Although the little green legumes don’t often appear on North American dinner plates, even the least adventurous of eaters have probably crossed paths with a mung bean or two—probably at the salad bar, in the form of sprouts. Before they take their place beside the olives and croutons (where they usually sneak in under the simpler moniker of bean sprouts), these crisp, white strands with tips the pale yellow-green of a frog that’s spent too much time playing video games come from a plant native to Southeast Asia. There, if they’re not sprouted in a darkened room and tossed atop a bowl of pho or noodles, they can be used much like lentils as the base for soups and stews or be formed into savory pancakes.

In Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese cooking, mung beans may adopt another, even more, dramatic disguise: a tangle of ultra-thin, transparent noodles. Known as bean threads, cellophane noodles, or Chinese vermicelli, these are made from the starch of ground mung beans and form a popular, sauce-absorbing base for stir-fry dishes. Finally, mung beans have a definite sweet side. Their mild, delicate flavor adds texture and body to rice puddings, pastry fillings, frozen treats, and the surreal-looking Vietnamese dessert drinks known as chè, where they often share space in clear plastic cups with other chewy floating bits such as kidney beans, longan fruit, and strips of grass jelly.