Vietnam is a country with diverse and diverse cuisines, with many unique and delicious dishes that appeal to diners everywhere. Vietnamese sweet soup is a popular snack in Vietnam, it can be in the form of pudding, or as a simple drink that combines fruit, vegetables, beans, seeds, glutinous rice and tapioca, and is often covered with top with coconut milk. Below are 5 most popular Vietnamese sweet soups:
Sticky Rice Balls in Ginger Syrup (Chè trôi nước)
Chè trôi nước is a Vietnamese dessert that combines sweet ginger-flavored soup and rice balls. The soup is usually sweetened with palm sugar, and it’s sometimes additionally flavored with pandan leaves, while the filling inside the glutinous rice balls traditionally includes a combination of coconut milk and mung bean paste.
Although it is considered a traditional Vietnamese specialty, it is believed that the dish was modeled on tangyuan—a similar sweet soup of Chinese origin. Chè trôi nước is always served warm, typically garnished with coconut milk and roasted sesame seeds.
Pomelo Sweet Soup (Chè bưởi)
Chè bưởi is a traditional Vietnamese pomelo soup. It’s made with a combination of pomelo, mung beans, and coconut. The green pomelo cover is peeled off, and the white spongy parts are used for the dish. They’re cut into cubes, salted, soaked in water, rinsed, boiled, and mixed with sugar and tapioca starch.
The mixture is combined with steamed mung beans, water, coconut milk, and sugar until the combination develops a thick consistency. This dessert is especially popular during the summer due to its cooling properties.
Lotus Seeds and Green Rice Flakes Sweet Soup (Chè hạt sen)
Chè hạt sen is a traditional Vietnamese sweet soup hailing from Hue. This local specialty contains buttery lotus seeds and green rice flakes in a sweet broth. Due to the cooling properties of this dish, locals often consume it in the summer in order to combat the heat.
In the past, this sweet soup was served to royal families. Nowadays, the residents of Hue serve it to important guests on special occasions.
Vietnamese Mung Bean Sweet Soup (Chè đậu xanh)
Chè đậu xanh is a traditional Vietnamese dessert soup. It’s prepared with mung beans as the main ingredient. Apart from the mung beans, the soup also contains water, sugar, and coconut milk. The beans are soaked, drained, rinsed, then slowly simmered with sugar until tender.
Coconut milk is added near the end of cooking, and the soup is then left to cool down or chilled in the refrigerator. Due to the fact that mung beans have cooling properties, chè đậu xanh is especially popular in the summer.
Three Color Dessert (Chè ba màu)
Chè ba màu is a colorful Vietnamese dish that belongs to the category of desserts, drinks, puddings, porridges, and soups regarding its consistency. It might include sticky rice, tapioca pearls, lotus seeds, sweet beans, water chestnuts, or agar jelly.
Regardless of the wide variety of ingredients used in chè, they are almost always drenched in coconut milk and additionally garnished with bananas, crushed peanuts, or other toppings. The dish is served either hot or cold, although it is especially popular as a chilly treat on hot summer days.
It is believed that the Cantonese dessert soup called tong sui is chè ba màu’s predecessor. The dish is sometimes referred to as three-layered dessert or rainbow dessert due to its three distinct layers: yellow (mung beans), red (azuki beans), and green (agar jelly with pandan extract).
There are also some other varieties of chè such as chè bap, chè ba ba, and chè dau den, but chè ba màu still holds the number one spot in terms of popularity.
