Healthy Mung Bean Salad Recipe • Turkey’s For Life

A healthy salad, filling and – most importantly – completely delicious! We’re doing a mung bean salad recipe in this article.

Stick with us on this one.

A Mung Bean Salad Bowl

It’s a lovely big bowl of green and it’s a perfect recipe for vegetarians and vegans – and omnivores, like us.

And, as with many of our Turkish recipes, there’s a tale as to how this mung bean salad came about.

Sources Of Inspiration

If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know we learn what we can about Turkish cuisine from a whole variety of sources.

One of those sources is the restaurants of Fethiye.

And we have Çarıklı Et Restaurant to thank for the introduction of dried mung beans into our life.

This was the place where we ate – and loved – mung beans for the first time.

They have a meze that we order whenever we go there – a yeşil tabaği (green plate).

Regular ingredients on the yeşil tabaği are broccoli, avocado and samphire. We like to keep it on the table as a side dish to whatever main meal we’re eating.

When we ordered it on our last visit there, we had a new addition of green.

We fork prodded, taste tested.

Too ‘meaty’ in both size and texture for green lentils. A slightly nutty flavour but not quite the right shape to be a baby pistacchio.

It soon transpired that we’d been spotted by the waiter and he came over to assist.

Maş fasulyesi. We know fasulye are beans. But maş was a new one on us.

Google Translate did the rest. Mung beans.

Lessons In Mung Beans – Maş Fasulyesi

We’d heard of mung beans. But our knowledge began and ended right there.

All of that has since changed, however, and our shelf of jarred dried foods now has the addition of dried mung beans.

The first recipe we did with them – the recipe in this article – is a healthy, nutrition-packed and delicious green mung bean salad inspired by the meze we love at Çarıklı.

But mung beans – also called moong beans or green gram – are also widely used in Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine.

When you eat a meal with bean sprouts; they’re mung bean sprouts. We may well be preaching to the converted, here, but that was a new one on us.

Always learning!

We’re looking forward to experimenting! Mung bean stew, soups and various ‘curries.’

Creative Salads

And we’re not remotely surprised that our first Turkish introduction to mung beans was by way of a creative salad recipe.

Turkish chefs are masters of salad recipes!

If you search on Turkish mung bean salad recipes – maş fasulyesi salatası – most have the addition of colour by way of red onions, chopped red bell peppers, sweetcorn and turşu (pickled vegetables).

In Turkish supermarkets, maş fasulyesi are growing in popularity and are being included in ready foods like soups and ‘mung bean bowls.’

But, as spring begins to make its presence felt, we love to play around with green dishes.

Our fresh broad bean salad with orzo is a lovely spring recipe that celebrates green.

And now, we can add this green mung bean salad bowl to the collection.

About Our Mung Bean Salad Ingredients

(Ingredient quantities are in the full recipe card at the bottom of this article).

We’ve made a couple of additions to our mung salad – of course, these are green ingredients.

And the beauty of making salads like this is we can indulge in seasonal eating and choose whatever greens are available at the time.

The one constant is the dried beans.

And you’re always going to end up with a really healthy recipe that can either be a side dish or a light lunch on its own!

Mung Beans (Moong Beans)

Obviously, we’re going to be using mung beans in our salad bowl. Whole, dried mung beans.

Cooking them is easy. We use the same method as we do for the green lentils in our green lentil salad recipe.

Roughly 3 parts water to 1 part mung beans.

We bring them to the boil and then simmer over a medium heat until they soften. This takes around 30 minutes.

Cooking them on the hob means you can do taste tests to check if your beans are cooked. You can also add a bit more water if needed.

When they’re cooked, pour them into a colander to drain any excess water and then pour cold water over them to stop them cooking further.

Broccoli

Simply blanched, broccoli is healthy, tasty and a wonderfully vibrant green colour.

The vegetable is already loved as a meze and enjoyed as the main ingredient in Turkish broccoli salad.

In our mung bean salad recipe, broccoli is getting some companions.

As with the beans, drain once your broccoli is al dente and pour cold water over it to prevent it from overcooking.

We don’t want to lose any of that vibrant greenery.

Avocado

Grown locally and on the local markets at the same time as broccoli, we usually make guacamole with avocado.

Avocado, along with the beans, makes our mung salad a more substantial side salad.

You need ripe avocados that are not overly soft and we use one avocado between two people.

We’re going to cut it in half lengthways and remove the stone. Scooping out the flesh with a spoon is really easy to do.

Cut this flesh into bite-sized slices or chunks.

Spring Onions / Green Onions

Spring onions are commonly used in Turkish salads and meze – kısır and mercimek köftesi are two that pop to mind.

For our mung bean salad, we also include a good bit of the green stem as well as the white onion.

These will be roughly chopped.

Fresh Coriander Leaves

At the moment on Çalış Sunday Market, one of the stalls is piled high with yeşillik (greenery) – fresh herbs and salad leaves of all varieties.

Where do you begin with a stall like this?

We love coriander so bought a big bunch of that.

We’re adding a handful of the leaves to our mung bean salad. No need to chop them.

Dressing

You can’t have a tasty salad without a generous dressing. And we’re keeping it Turkish for our mung bean salad.

Fresh lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil, a pinch of salt and freshly ground black pepper. And, of course, a drizzle of nar ekşisi (pomegranate molasses).

Building & Serving Our Mung Bean Salad

We don’t want the avocado to start mashing up in our salad so we’re leaving those to one side for now.

In a large bowl, we mix all of our other ingredients together.

If you’re serving your mung bean salad separately in individual portions, take a small bowl and add slices of avocado around the edge of the bowl.

Then spoon the mixed salad into the middle, dress it and serve.

• Your mung bean salad will make a perfect standalone light lunch.
• It will also be a tasty side dish to grilled meats like steaks, köfte and chicken shish kebabs.
• And, of course, it will be a perfect addition to your seafood meze table.
• We also love it served alongside spicy ezme and minty yoghurt dip with freshly made, hot balloon bread as you can see in the photo below. Yummy!

Mung Bean Salad – FAQs

Our Healthy, Seasonal Mung Bean Salad Recipe

As this is a salad, quantities of each ingredient are up to you. These are the rough quantities that we use.