Recipe Research - Red Bean Soup (红豆汤)

"Soft and chewy tang yuan (sticky rice balls/mochi balls) served in sweet red bean soup is another variety of tang yuan recipes you will enjoy to celebrate the Chinese dongzhi festival or as a tong sui dessert. The recipe can be cooked in Instant Pot pressure cooker or on the stove."

Recipe Link

Recipe Research Evaluation

Recipe Info

Ingredients

Red Bean Soup

Tang Yuan Dough

Instructions

  1. Rehydrate the dried Mandarin peel. Soak the dried peels in warm water for 15 minutes or until they are soft. Scrape off the white part inside the peel if any.
  2. Soak the red beans. Pour enough water to cover the red beans and soak for at least 4 hours or overnight. Discard the soaking water.
  3. Cook on the stove. Put the beans, dried peel, and water in a large pot and bring to a boil. Then lower the heat to let it simmer until the beans are soft, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. You may need to add some water during the cooking period. Cook until some of the beans are broken and some are still whole. When you are happy with the consistency, stir in brown sugar.
  4. Prepare the tang yuan dough. Mix glutinous rice flour and icing sugar in a mixing bowl. Add the boiling hot water. Stir to mix with a spatula at first and when it's not too hot anymore, use a clean hand to mix and knead into a non-sticky dough. Add a bit of water as needed to form a dough. Cover it with plastic wrap to prevent it from drying out.
  5. Form the dough balls. Pinch off about 8-10 grams of dough and then roll into small balls. Keep the small balls covered with plastic wrap too. Continue with the rest.
  6. Cook the tang yuan. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. When it reaches a rolling boil, add the tang yuan balls and cook until they float to the top. Once they float to the top, cook for another 1 minute. Use a slotted spoon to remove them from the pot and submerge them in a fresh water briefly to stop the cooking process and to prevent them from sticking to each other.
  7. Serve hot. Ladle the sweet red bean soup into serving bowls and add tang yuan balls, it's up to you how many balls you want to add for each serving.

Storage

Leftover sweet red bean soup can be stored in the fridge for up to one week max. The tang yuan balls can be stirred into the soup and kept in the soup. They will soften when you reheat them on the stove or in the microwave.

Sample Imagery

Recipe Websites

Taste of Home

I appreciate the way the information is organized in this website such that everything feels really accessible. Having the ingredients and the directions side by side seems helpful for someone actually trying the recipe.

Budget Bytes

This website includes a lot of repetition of bright yellow elements, and most of the words that are emphasized or part of a header are all caps. This consistency makes the page look both eye catching and cohesive. I also like the interactive element of being able to check off the ingredients.

Curated Kitchenware

Overall, the design of this page is pretty clean and minimalistic. There are some fun motion graphic elements, but I definitely prefer the softer movement of the gray wave over the moving diagonal lines in the "Additional Recipe Info" section. While the lines fit the rest of the website visually, I feel like they move a bit fast and are distracting.

Non-Recipe Websites

Marimekko

As a brand, Marimekko uses a lot of bold colors and shapes. Even in the homepage of the website, they display these features effectively without feeling overwhelming by grouping products by color in a way that feels seamless, switching from combinations of blue and red to just one color or the other. I also want to find an effective color palette that looks interesting without feeling overbearing.

Mejuri

I think it is interesting how, as you scroll down, one side stays still for longer as the other side scrolls. I feel like this split view and the differences in scrolling could translate into a recipe website, where there are different kinds of information that could be useful at once, but at the same time, these categories of information differ in their length, so it could help for one side to stay on screen longer as the other side scrolls.

Nestig

I really like how the images that users can click respond to the mouse hovering over them. The solid shapes framing the photos change color, showing a response, but the colors they change to vary, yet they all match the pastel theme. I love the use of simple, organic shapes, and I also want to potentially bring in a hand drawn look for my recipe page as well.