Every kitchen has one jar that gets ignored. It sits at the back of the cupboard, behind the lentils you bought for a January health kick and the pearl barley nobody remembers buying. In a lot of British homes, that jar holds mung beans. Which is a shame, because the humble mung bean is one of the most useful, forgiving and frankly underrated ingredients you can own.
In this guide I want to change that. We will cover what mung beans actually are, how to cook them (with and without soaking), how to grow your own bean sprouts on the kitchen windowsill, and a handful of recipes I come back to again and again, from a silky Chinese sweet soup to a weeknight dal that tastes like it took far longer than it did. By the end, that jar should be at the front of the cupboard. Possibly with a little spotlight on it.
Mung beans at a glance
If you only have thirty seconds, here is the short version:
- What they are: small, olive-green pulses, also sold as green gram, moong beans or, in Chinese, Lu Dou (绿豆).
- Taste: mild, earthy and very slightly sweet, so they work in savoury dishes and desserts alike.
- Soaking: optional. Whole mung beans cook from dry in about 30 to 40 minutes; a soak of an hour or more cuts that to around 20 to 25.
- Best known for: dal, Chinese mung bean soup (lu dou tang), bean sprouts and, more recently, plant-based "egg".
- Storage: dried mung beans keep for a year or more in an airtight jar, somewhere cool and dark.
What exactly are mung beans?
Mung beans are the seeds of Vigna radiata, a small leafy plant in the legume family. They are a little smaller than a peppercorn, oval rather than round, with a matt green skin and a tiny white mark where the bean was attached to the pod. Under the skin is a pale yellow centre, which is why split, skinned mung beans look nothing like the whole ones and are often sold separately as moong dal.
The bean has collected more names than a Victorian aristocrat. You will see it labelled as:
- Mung beans or green mung beans, the most common name in UK shops.
- Moong or moong beans, from Hindi, and the name you will find in most Indian grocers.
- Green gram, an older English name still used on many packets.
- Lu Dou (Mandarin) or Luk Dou (Cantonese), literally "green bean".
- Đậu xanh in Vietnamese and kacang hijau in Malay and Indonesian, both of which also mean "green bean".
Here is the bit that surprises most people: if you have ever eaten a stir-fry from a Chinese takeaway, you have almost certainly eaten mung beans. Those crunchy white bean sprouts are, in the vast majority of cases, sprouted mung beans. And the slippery, translucent glass noodles (also called cellophane noodles) are traditionally made from mung bean starch. The bean has been feeding you quietly for years. It simply never asked for credit.
Whole, split or sprouted?
Before you cook, it helps to know which form you are holding:
- Whole mung beans keep their green skin. They hold their shape reasonably well, have the most earthy flavour and are the ones you need for sprouting. Our dried mung beans (Lu Dou) are whole, unsplit beans.
- Split mung beans with skin (sometimes called chilka moong) cook faster and break down into a thicker texture.
- Split and skinned mung beans (yellow moong dal) cook in 15 to 20 minutes and collapse into a smooth, creamy purée. Lovely in dal, useless for sprouting.
- Mung bean sprouts are the germinated beans, sold fresh in supermarkets, or grown at home from whole dried beans (more on that shortly).
A very short history of a very old bean
Mung beans have been cooked for thousands of years. They were domesticated on the Indian subcontinent and travelled east into China and South-East Asia, where they became a staple of everyday cooking. In Chinese kitchens they are one of the classic "summer" ingredients: a bowl of chilled mung bean soup on a sticky August afternoon is about as traditional as a 99 Flake on Brighton beach.
In India, mung dal is comfort food in its purest form. Mung beans are cooked with rice to make khichdi, the dish many Indian families turn to when someone needs something gentle and warming. Further south, in Andhra Pradesh, whole green gram is ground into the batter for pesarattu, a thin, crisp, slightly nutty pancake that deserves to be far more famous in Britain than it is.
And the bean is still finding new jobs. California-based Eat Just discovered that protein isolated from mung beans behaves a lot like egg when it is heated, and built its plant-based JUST Egg around it. In 2022 the European Commission approved mung bean protein as a novel food, the first legume protein to clear that particular hurdle. Not bad for something that spent centuries being boiled in a pot with a bit of sugar.
Who is cooking with mung beans?
Pulses used to have a slightly worthy reputation in this country, all hessian sacks and wholefood co-ops. That has changed, and a few well-known names have helped.
Sir Lewis Hamilton has followed a plant-based diet since 2017 and has talked openly about it ever since. He even co-founded the vegan burger chain Neat Burger in 2019, which tells you something about how far plant-based eating has travelled from the lentil-and-sandals stereotype. You do not win championships on a diet of sad lettuce, and pulses like mung beans are exactly the kind of ingredient that makes a plant-based plate feel properly filling.
In the kitchen, the London cook and writer Meera Sodha has done more than most to show British home cooks what beans and pulses can do. Her long-running "New Vegan" column in The Guardian and her book East are packed with vegan and vegetarian dishes from across Asia that never feel like a compromise. If you want proof that a dal can be the star of a dinner party, her work is a good place to start.
And then there is the quiet army of people who have been eating mung beans every day for generations without making any fuss about it: grandmothers in Guangzhou, Gujarat and Ho Chi Minh City, each convinced their version is the only correct one. They are all right, of course. That is the joy of this bean.
How to choose and buy mung beans
Good dried mung beans are boringly consistent, and boring is exactly what you want. Look for:
- An even green colour. A few lighter or darker beans are normal, but a bag that looks faded or dusty may be old stock.
- Whole, unbroken beans. A small number of split beans is fine; lots of fragments and powder at the bottom of the bag is not.
- No little holes, webbing or musty smell. Your nose is a better quality check than most labels.
- Clear labelling. Check whether the beans are whole, split or skinned, so you know what you are cooking.
Everything in the Vita range is non-sulphur treated, and our 100g pack of mung beans is a sensible size for trying a few of the recipes below before you commit to a larger bag. If you already cook with pulses, it sits happily alongside our red adzuki beans (Hong Dou) and yellow soya beans (Huang Dou).
How to store dried mung beans
Tip them into an airtight jar or tub and keep them somewhere cool, dry and out of direct sunlight. A kitchen cupboard away from the oven is perfect. Stored like this, they keep well for a year or more, although older beans take a little longer to cook. If you find your beans stubbornly refusing to soften, age is usually the culprit, not you. Write the date you opened the bag on a bit of masking tape. Future you will be grateful.
How to cook mung beans
This is the part most people overthink. Mung beans are among the easiest pulses to cook, and unlike red kidney beans they do not need an overnight soak or a fierce boil to be safe. They simply need to be cooked until soft. Here is my method, followed by the variations.
The basic hob method
- Rinse and sort. Tip the beans into a sieve, rinse under cold water and pick out any tiny stones or shrivelled beans. It takes thirty seconds and saves a dentist's bill.
- Soak, if you have time. Cover with plenty of cold water for one to eight hours. This is optional, but it shortens the cooking time and helps the beans cook evenly.
- Simmer. Drain, then put the beans in a pan with about three times their volume of fresh water (roughly 750ml of water to 250g of beans). Bring to the boil, skim off any foam, then turn down to a gentle simmer with the lid slightly ajar.
- Check. Soaked beans take about 20 to 25 minutes; unsoaked beans take 30 to 40 minutes. They are done when you can squash one easily between your finger and thumb and some of the skins are starting to split.
- Season at the end. Add salt once the beans are tender. Salting early will not ruin them, whatever your aunt says, but it can toughen the skins slightly on older beans.
How long to cook mung beans
| Method | Unsoaked | Soaked (1–8 hours) |
|---|---|---|
| Hob, gentle simmer | 30–40 minutes | 20–25 minutes |
| Pressure cooker / Instant Pot | about 8–10 minutes at high pressure | about 5–6 minutes at high pressure |
| Slow cooker (in a soup or dal) | 4–6 hours on low | 3–4 hours on low |
Times vary with the age of the beans and the hardness of your water, so treat the table as a guide rather than gospel. Taste a few beans before you call it done.
Mung beans water ratio
For beans you want to keep whole (salads, bowls, stir-fries), use about three parts water to one part beans and drain off any excess at the end. For soups and dal, go to four or five parts water and let the beans break down into the liquid. You can always add a splash of hot water halfway through if things are looking thick. Mung beans are very forgiving like that: the culinary equivalent of a Labrador.
Why are my mung beans still hard?
Three common reasons:
- Old beans. Beans that have sat in a cupboard for years lose moisture and take longer to soften. Keep simmering, and buy a fresher bag next time.
- Very hard water. If you live somewhere with chalky water (hello, London and much of the South East), cooking can take longer. Using filtered water helps.
- Acid added too early. Tomatoes, lemon juice or tamarind added at the start can slow the softening. Add them once the beans are tender.
How to sprout mung beans at home
Sprouting mung beans is one of those kitchen projects that feels faintly magical, like making your own yoghurt or getting a sourdough starter to behave. You need a jar, a bit of muslin or a sprouting lid, and about three days.
- Soak. Put 3 to 4 tablespoons of whole mung beans in a clean jar, cover with plenty of cold water and leave overnight (8 to 12 hours). They will roughly double in size.
- Drain. Cover the jar with muslin secured by an elastic band, or use a sprouting lid, and drain away all the water.
- Rinse twice a day. Morning and evening, fill the jar with cool water, swirl, and drain thoroughly. Leave the jar tilted at an angle, mouth down, so excess water can escape. Standing water is the enemy.
- Keep them dark-ish. A cupboard or a corner of the worktop away from direct sun gives paler, crisper sprouts, closer to the ones you buy.
- Harvest. After two to four days the shoots will be 1 to 5cm long. Give them a final rinse, drain well and keep them in the fridge. Use within two days.
A word on food safety. The warm, damp conditions that make seeds sprout are also rather popular with bacteria. The UK Food Standards Agency advises that bean sprouts should only be eaten raw if they are labelled "ready to eat"; all others, which includes anything you sprout at home, should be cooked thoroughly until steaming hot all the way through. In practice that is no hardship: home-grown sprouts are wonderful flash-fried in a hot wok, stirred into noodle soup or tossed into a curry for the last few minutes. Keep your jar and muslin scrupulously clean, wash your hands, and discard any batch that smells sour or looks slimy.
Our favourite mung bean recipes
Here are the dishes I make most often. They are all vegetarian or vegan, none of them needs a specialist shop beyond what is in your cupboard (and perhaps ours), and every one has been tested in a normal home kitchen with a normal amount of patience.
1. Chinese sweet mung bean soup (lu dou tang)
This is the classic. In Chinese households it is served warm in winter and chilled from the fridge in summer, and it is about as simple as cooking gets. Serves 4.
- 150g whole mung beans, rinsed
- 1.5 litres water
- 40–60g rock sugar or light brown sugar, to taste
- Optional: a small handful of dried lily bulb (Bai He), soaked, or a strip of dried tangerine peel
Soak the beans for an hour if you have time. Put them in a pan with the water, bring to the boil, then simmer with the lid ajar for 40 to 50 minutes, until the beans have burst and the liquid has turned cloudy and slightly green. Add the lily bulb for the last 20 minutes if using. Stir in the sugar until dissolved and taste: it should be gently sweet, not syrupy. Serve warm, or cool and chill. The colour can turn from green to reddish-brown as it sits; that is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. It tastes exactly the same.
2. Weeknight mung bean and coconut dal
Whole mung beans make a heartier, more textured dal than split lentils, and the coconut milk rounds everything off beautifully. Serves 4.
- 200g whole mung beans, soaked for 1–2 hours
- 1 litre water
- 2 tbsp neutral oil or coconut oil
- 1 tsp cumin seeds and 1 tsp black mustard seeds
- 1 onion, finely chopped; 3 garlic cloves and a thumb of fresh ginger, grated
- 1 tsp ground turmeric, 1 tsp ground coriander, ½ tsp chilli powder
- 2 tomatoes, chopped; 200ml coconut milk; juice of ½ lemon; fresh coriander to finish
Simmer the drained beans in the water for about 25 minutes until soft and starting to break down. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a frying pan, add the cumin and mustard seeds and let them crackle for a few seconds, then add the onion and fry gently for 8 to 10 minutes until golden. Stir in the garlic, ginger and ground spices for a minute, then the tomatoes, and cook until jammy. Tip the lot into the beans, add the coconut milk and simmer for another 10 minutes. Season with salt and lemon, scatter with coriander and serve with rice or warm flatbreads. It is even better the next day, which makes it ideal for packed lunches and smug colleagues.
3. Mung bean salad with herbs and lime
A bright, crunchy salad that holds up well in a lunchbox. Serves 2 as a main or 4 as a side.
- 150g whole mung beans, cooked until just tender (about 20 minutes after soaking) and cooled
- 1 cucumber, diced; 1 red pepper, diced; 4 spring onions, sliced
- A big handful each of mint and coriander, chopped
- Dressing: juice of 2 limes, 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tbsp toasted sesame oil, 1 small red chilli, finely chopped
- To finish: toasted peanuts or toasted black sesame seeds
The trick here is not to overcook the beans; you want them tender but still holding their shape. Let them cool completely before mixing, otherwise the herbs wilt and the whole thing goes a bit sad. Toss everything together with the dressing, taste for salt and sharpness, and finish with the nuts or seeds just before serving. It keeps in the fridge for a couple of days, although the herbs are at their best on day one.
4. Pesarattu (green gram pancakes)
This crisp South Indian pancake is made from soaked, ground whole mung beans with no flour at all. Makes about 8.
- 200g whole mung beans, soaked for 6–8 hours
- 2 tbsp rice (optional, for extra crispness), soaked with the beans
- 2 green chillies, a thumb of ginger, ½ tsp cumin seeds, salt
- Oil for the pan; finely chopped onion and coriander to scatter
Drain the beans and blend with the chillies, ginger, cumin, salt and just enough water to make a pourable batter, a little thicker than single cream. Heat a non-stick or well-seasoned pan, wipe with oil, pour in a ladleful and spread it into a thin circle with the back of the ladle. Scatter with onion and coriander, drizzle a few drops of oil round the edge and cook until the underside is golden and crisp, about two minutes. Flip briefly if you like, then fold and serve with coconut chutney. The first one will be a disaster. It always is. Eat it yourself and carry on.
5. Mung bean and spinach curry
A gentle, savoury curry that leans on the beans for body. Serves 4.
- 200g whole mung beans, cooked until soft
- 2 tbsp oil; 1 onion, sliced; 3 garlic cloves; a thumb of ginger
- 2 tsp garam masala; 1 tsp ground cumin; ½ tsp turmeric
- 400g tin chopped tomatoes; 200g spinach; salt and lemon to taste
Fry the onion until soft and golden, add the garlic, ginger and spices for a minute, then the tomatoes. Simmer for 10 minutes until thickened, stir in the cooked beans with a splash of their cooking water and simmer for another 10 minutes. Wilt in the spinach at the end, season, and finish with a squeeze of lemon. Serve with basmati rice or naan.
6. Quick stir-fried home-grown sprouts
The best reward for your three days of sprouting. Serves 2 as a side.
Heat a wok until it is smoking hot, add a tablespoon of oil, then a sliced garlic clove and a few slices of ginger. After ten seconds, throw in two big handfuls of your rinsed, well-drained sprouts with a handful of sliced spring onion. Toss constantly over a high heat for two to three minutes until the sprouts are steaming hot throughout but still crunchy. Season with a splash of soy sauce and a few drops of sesame oil. Done before the rice cooker has finished clicking.
Mung beans vs other beans
People often ask whether mung beans can stand in for other pulses. Sometimes they can, sometimes they really cannot. A quick comparison:
| Mung beans | Red lentils | Adzuki beans | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Soaking needed? | Optional | No | Recommended |
| Cooking time (whole) | 20–40 minutes | 15–20 minutes | 45–60 minutes after soaking |
| Texture when cooked | Soft, holds shape at first, then creamy | Breaks down completely | Soft and creamy, slightly floury |
| Flavour | Mild, earthy, faintly sweet | Mild, slightly nutty | Sweet, nutty |
| Best for | Dal, soups, salads, sprouting, sweet soup | Quick dal, soups | Red bean paste, sweet soups, rice |
In short: mung beans can replace lentils in most soups and dals if you allow a little extra cooking time. For sweet red bean paste, though, nothing beats adzuki beans, and the two together make a lovely mixed-bean sweet soup.
Mung beans in a balanced diet
As with all pulses, mung beans are a natural source of plant protein and fibre, and they naturally contain minerals such as potassium and magnesium, as well as folate. That makes them a useful, inexpensive building block for anyone eating more plant-based meals, whether you are fully vegan or simply trying to cook meat-free a few nights a week.
In Chinese food tradition, mung beans are thought of as a "cooling" food, which is why mung bean soup is so popular in hot weather. It is a lovely piece of culinary heritage rather than a medical claim, and it explains why, in many families, the soup pot comes out the moment the temperature passes 25°C. As with any food, mung beans are best enjoyed as part of a varied, balanced diet.
Frequently asked questions about mung beans
Do mung beans need soaking?
No. Whole mung beans can be cooked straight from dry in 30 to 40 minutes. Soaking for an hour or more shortens the cooking time to around 20 to 25 minutes and helps them cook more evenly, but it is not essential.
Are mung beans and green gram the same thing?
Yes. Green gram, moong beans, green mung beans and Lu Dou are all names for the same bean. Split, skinned mung beans are usually sold as moong dal.
Can you eat mung beans raw?
Dried mung beans should always be cooked before eating. Home-grown mung bean sprouts should also be cooked until steaming hot, in line with Food Standards Agency advice; only shop-bought sprouts labelled "ready to eat" are intended to be eaten raw.
Why has my mung bean soup turned red?
Natural compounds in the bean skins react with oxygen and with minerals in your water, which can turn the soup from green to reddish-brown. It is harmless and does not change the flavour. Using filtered water and a lid helps keep the green colour a little longer.
How long do cooked mung beans keep?
Cool them quickly and keep them covered in the fridge for up to three days. Cooked mung beans also freeze well for up to three months; freeze them in portions with a little of their cooking liquid.
Are mung beans the same as bean sprouts?
Most of the bean sprouts sold in the UK are sprouted mung beans, yes. You can grow your own from whole dried mung beans in two to four days.
Are mung beans suitable for vegans?
Yes. Mung beans are entirely plant-based and suit vegan, vegetarian and flexitarian cooking.
Bring the jar to the front of the cupboard
If you have made it this far, you now know more about mung beans than most people who have been eating them in takeaway stir-fries for decades. They are cheap, quick to cook, happy in sweet or savoury dishes, and they will even grow you a fresh vegetable on the windowsill. Not many ingredients can say that.
Start with the sweet soup or the dal, then try sprouting a batch. Once you are hooked, you will find yourself adding mung beans to everything. Our whole dried mung beans (Lu Dou) are non-sulphur treated and ready for your first pot, and if you are looking for more ideas, our article on five fantastic uses for green mung beans is a good next stop.
Happy cooking. And if anyone asks what is in the pot, just tell them it is the bean that has been hiding in their takeaway all along.
