Top 5 Sweet Soup you have to try when traveling Vietnam

Sweet Soup (Che) truly is Vietnamese typical dessert? At least not in the western world. It’s a Vietnamese sweet drink, soup, or pudding that consists of a syrupy liquid poured over ice. There are many different versions, but the most common are served with a type of bean, fruit, jelly, or grain. The beans are often mashed up they provide a consistentcy similar to icing. Add a bunch of sugar and it tastes a lot like icing. The jelly that is often floating around in it, looking like a creature from the Vietnamese swamps, has a texture that isn’t typical in North America. It’s chewy and slimey, but the taste isn’t bad. The liquid sometimes contains coconut milk, which is a real treat for even the most westernized of taste buds. For less than a dollar you can buy a cup at a stand, so why not try it? It’ll satisfy that sweet tooth, and cool you off on a hot Vietnamese day.Some sweet soup desserts come warm but for the most part, are served cold with a scoop of shaved ice, making it a popular goodie during Saigon’s dry hot season between the months of November and May. It’s a treat that might be bizarre at first for a non-Vietnamese person but there’s no doubt that it will leave you wanting more.

Before starting top 5 sweet soup in Vietnam below, I just want to notice you that Vietnamese Sweet Soup is really wealthy. Up to now, there are at least 65 kinds of popular Sweet soups in Vietnam. This top 5 are not the most delicious ones because each kind has different aspects of taste, but focus on popularities in Vietnam.

Che Ba Mau (Three Colored Sweet Soup)

Three Colored Sweet Soup 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 Three Colored Sweet Soup’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 (jelly with pandan extract).

Che Dau Xanh (Green Beans Sweet Soup)

Green Beans Sweet Soup 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, fried seaweed, 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.

Che Buoi (Pomelo Sweet Soup)

This Sweet Soup has main ingredient from grapefruit oil and slivered rind. 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.

Che Hat Sen (Lotus Seeds Sweet Soup) 

 Che hat 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. Some version also put more topping to color this simple sweetsoup, most common is Aloe jellyIn the past, this sweet soup was served to royal families. Nowadays, the residents of Hue serve it to important guests on special occasions.

Che Troi Nuoc (Rice Ball Sweet Soup)

Che Troi Nuoc 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. Che Troi nuoc is always served warm, typically garnished with coconut milk and roasted sesame seeds. It is commonly enjoyed as a comforting wintertime dessert.Source: tasteatlas.com