What is it?
From many stunning Vietnamese sweet soups, Longan and Lotus Seed Sweet Soup is considered as a quintessence, a harmony of heaven and earth. This is a nourishing sweet soup with natural sweetness, nice fragrance and high nutritional value which can easily satisfy your thirst as well as refresh your mind.
Longan and Lotus Seed Sweet Soup (Chè Sen Long Nhãn) – photo by dan toan (Flickr)
How do you make it?
The ingredients to carry out this dish are very simple: Fresh longan, Dried lotus seed, Sugar and Candy Sugar (Chinese Rock Sugar), Coconut juice and Fresh coconut.
First of all, you soak the dried lotus seeds in warm water for about 1 hour then keep boil it on medium-low for another 1 hour until tender. To check the doneness, they should be soft when gently pressed and crushed between your thumb and index finger. After that, you drain the liquid and add sugar to the cooked lotus seeds, make sure that the seeds absorb the sugar evenly.
A sweet soup with clear and light sweetness – photo by popcorn_akido (Flickr)
On the part of logans, you just need to peel them off, remove the seeds inside but what is important is that you need to be careful to keep the longans whole. Then, stuff the cooked lotus seed into longans, be gentle if you don’t want to break the lotus seeds and ruin the dish.
The lotus seeds can be put inside or left outside longan fruit. Longan can be both dried one or fresh one – photo by brotherminh (Flickr)
For the last step, you cook the coconut juice with candy sugar until the sugar dissolves but do not allow boiling; arrange the stuffed longans beautifully in a bowl then pour the liquid in. If you let the coconut juice boiled and becoming too hot, it will make the stuffed logans cooked and lose its crunchy texture. Sprinkle fresh shredded coconut on top for the final touch.
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