Thursday, March 18, 2010

Would you like kidney beans with your iced dessert?


Popular dessert in Malaysia: cendol. Cendol is a shaved ice dessert that is doused in coconut milk, pandan flavored green noodles, kidney beans and palm sugar. Other variations include grass jelly, red beans, durian, glutinous rice and the one that most foreigners gag when they try, creamed corn. Mine came with a healthy serving of chocolate syrup. 

Malaysians aren't the only ones that like beans in their iced desserts--you can find variations on this in Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia.

In the Philippines I had an even more intense version called halo-halo that included garbanzo beans, ube (purple yam) ice cream, condensed milk, mung beans and about a half dozen other unidentified ingredients. It was delicious but definitely has a bit of the wtf factor--I was on a beach eating this delicious dessert and then suddenly I'd remember it was filled with beans. Easy way to get your five-a-day, though. 

3 comments:

  1. The beans make it a complete meal!

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  2. They have something like this in Hawaii, too -- like a snow cone topped with Azuki beans and sometimes vanilla ice cream. It's called shave ice and it's really good.

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  3. red faced ambiguousMarch 22, 2010 at 3:25 PM

    This is the most putrid dish i've seen on your website (including red faced ambiguous and clear pull the bull's penis).

    ReplyDelete