Mung Bean Paste
Mung bean paste is a cooked bean filling made from the seeds of Vigna radiata, milled to a smooth or lightly textured paste and cooked down with sugar and an edible fat to a firm, low moisture mass.
Mung bean is a starch rich pulse, carrying roughly 60 percent starch and 22 to 25 percent protein on a dry basis, and the paste takes its body from gelatinised bean starch rather than from added hydrocolloid. Hulled beans give a pale yellow paste with a clean, faintly sweet bean flavour, while unhulled beans give a greener colour and a more pronounced skin note. During the frying down step, sugar and fat displace water and the starch is partly retrograded, so the finished paste sets to a plastic solid that can be rolled, portioned and enclosed in dough without slumping.
It comes as a block, a bulk pail or a piped extrudable paste, at moisture in the mid twenties to mid thirties by percentage and a correspondingly low water activity. Stability rests on that combination of sugar concentration, low water activity and pasteurisation during cooking, and the paste is normally held chilled or frozen for extended life because it contains no acid to assist preservation.
We source bulk Mung Bean Paste from top China manufacturers for our partners. The manufacturer is in Shandong. A smaller requirement can ship in a combined container with other ingredients.
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- Function
- Bakery ingredient
Specifications
| Item | Specification |
|---|---|
| Appearance | Smooth homogeneous paste, free from husk fragments and foreign matter |
| Colour | Pale yellow to light greenish yellow, uniform |
| Flavour and odour | Characteristic cooked mung bean, sweet, no scorched or fermented note |
| Total soluble solids | 65 to 72 degrees Brix |
| Moisture | 28.0 percent maximum |
| Total sugars | 40 to 50 percent |
| Fat | 8 to 15 percent |
| Water activity | 0.80 maximum |
| pH | 6.0 to 7.0 |
| Lead | 0.2 mg/kg maximum |
| Total plate count | 1,000 cfu/g maximum |
| Yeast and mould | 50 cfu/g maximum |
| Escherichia coli | Negative in 1 g |
| Salmonella | Negative in 25 g |
Common Markets Grades
The main grade division is between smooth paste, in which the cooked beans are passed through a fine screen and the husk fraction discarded, and coarse or whole bean paste, which keeps some skin and particulate for texture. Hulled and unhulled starting material give distinctly different colours, and both are traded. Fat content splits the range further: lard or vegetable fat pastes at 8 to 15 percent are used where richness and long term softness are wanted, and reduced fat or oil free pastes are made for steamed bun and beverage applications.
Sugar level is the other grading axis, running from conventional pastes at 40 to 50 percent sugar on the finished weight down to low sugar grades that rely on refrigeration for stability and on maltitol or other polyols where sugar is replaced. Bake stable grades are formulated with a higher solids content and additional starch so that the filling does not boil out of a pastry, and freeze thaw stable grades are adjusted so the paste does not weep after frozen distribution.
Applications
- Mooncake fillings, where the paste must hold its shape through moulding and baking without cracking the skin
- Steamed buns and filled dumplings, in which the paste has to remain soft after steaming and cooling
- Chinese pastry such as mung bean cake and flaky pastry rounds, pressed into moulds or laminated dough
- Ice cream and frozen dessert ripples and centres, dosed for bean flavour and colour
- Bubble tea and blended drink bases, thinned with water or milk into a mung bean beverage
- Bread fillings and sweet rolls, piped or sheeted into the dough before proof
- Mochi and glutinous rice confections, portioned as a ball centre
- Chilled desserts, puddings and layered cups, where the paste supplies both body and flavour
- Pancake and crepe fillings in foodservice, spread cold or warm
China Manufacturers of Mung Bean Paste
Top Mung Bean Paste manufacturers in China.
Company names and logos are the property of the manufacturers themselves. They are listed here because our own directory records them as producing this ingredient. A listing is not an endorsement by them, and we do not represent them or speak on their behalf.
Regulatory Status
Mung bean paste is a composite food rather than a food additive, so it has no E number and no additive listing. It is manufactured under the general hygiene and process control frameworks, Regulation 852/2004 and the general food law in the European Union and the preventive controls rules of 21 CFR Part 117 in the United States, with the hot fill and cooling step normally documented as a critical control point. Mung bean and the sugars used are conventional foods with a long history of consumption, so no novel food assessment applies in either market.
Where the paste carries functional additives the individual ingredients carry their own status. Potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate, used in some ambient stable grades, hold authorisation in the European Union as the preservatives E202 and E211 under Regulation 1333/2008, and 21 CFR 182.3640 and 21 CFR 184.1733 respectively permit them in the United States. Modified starches used as bake stabilisers are authorised in both markets, and any colour must be declared and permitted for the food category. Labelling follows the composite food rules, with the full ingredient list declared and any allergen from the fat or flavour system, for example milk fat or wheat derived components, identified.
Manufacturing Process
Dry mung beans are cleaned of stones and foreign seed, then either dehulled between abrasive rollers with the loose skins removed by aspiration, or left whole for the darker grades. The beans are steeped in water for several hours to hydrate the starch fully, then cooked, usually by pressure cooking with steam, until the cotyledons break down completely. Cooked beans are milled with water into a slurry and passed through a refining screen or decanter, which removes residual husk and coarse fibre and produces a wet bean sediment. That sediment is dewatered on a plate press or in a decanter centrifuge to a firm cake, the intermediate that Chinese practice calls raw bean sha.
The cake is transferred to a jacketed cooking kettle or a continuous scraped surface cooker with sugar and fat, and cooked with constant agitation while water evaporates. This frying down step drives moisture from roughly 60 percent in the cake to the finished target, dissolves the sugar into the aqueous phase, and disperses the fat through the starch matrix. Any preservative, flavour or colour is added late in the cook. The hot paste is discharged at above 85 degrees Celsius, filled while still hot into cartons, pails or vacuum bags so that filling temperature serves as the pasteurisation step, then cooled rapidly and either chilled or frozen for storage.
