Roasted and lightly salted or spiced mung bean is a popular snack in most parts of India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dal#Common_ingredients

Humans seem to have a thing for crunchy, salty snacks and roasted mung beans fall right into that category. They are a popular snack across most of India, and versions can be found in several other Southeast Asian nations as well.

Most of the recipes I looked at keep it super simple, with just three ingredients; mung beans, oil, salt. You can of course add other spices to change them up, and I have included a couple of the most popular ones in the optional ingredients, but really your imagination is the limit here. Toss the warm, toasted beans with your favorite spice blend, let them cool, and voila!

Roasted beans may sound a little weird to the average American. Roasted chickpeas certainly had a moment a few years back, but I don’t know how far beyond the food blog world that really caught on. Folks with old hippie connections might remember soy-nuts (my memories are not particularly fond ones).

On the other hand, most of us eat roasted peanuts. Peanuts are also legumes, so the stretch to roasted mung beans suddenly seems a little less extreme.

Flavor wise, they remind me most of roasted sunflower seeds. They’re slightly addicting, the first handful or two make you want more, but I find that after a few handfuls I’m satisfied; no absentmindedly eating the entire bowl like I would with peanuts or potato chips. They are quite crunchy, similar to corn nuts in texture. I’m not entirely sure if that’s just how they are or if I left them in the oven a little too long. They did seem to get harder as they cooled. They are certainly still edible, but if you have weak teeth, maybe choose a different snack.

Mung beans are, of course, high in protein and also contain large amounts of fiber, folate, manganese, magnesium, B vitamins, and phosphorus, among others. Across South Asia they seem to be considered one of the healthiest, easiest to digest beans. You’ve probably eaten bean sprouts in one asian dish or another, which are usually grown from mung beans.

Soaking the beans for 12-24 hours and changing the water several times help remove some of the undigestible oligosaccharides. It also softens the beans, and may cause them to begin to sprout, helping make more nutrients available. Once the beans are soaked, drain and rinse them again, then leave them to air dry for a while before tossing with oil and salt. Roasting only takes 20-30 minutes!

While oven roasting was by far the most common method I saw and seems to be the method used in India, in Thailand they seem to deep fry them, and I also saw recipes that just dry roasted them in a frying pan.

Roasted Mung Beans

Yield: ~2 cups
Prep: 5 minutes
Soak: 12-24 hours
Cook: 30 minutes
Total 12:30-24:30

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