Peanut Soup recipe Chinese

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Sweet Peanut Soup

This is my home-made sweet peanut soup and the taste is exactly the same as the ones sold at Jelutong market. You need only a few ingredients: peanuts, water, and rock sugar. That’s all.

Ingredients:

12 oz. peanuts (skin peeled)
Rock sugar (to taste)
8 cups water
3-4 tablespoons coconut milk (optional)

Method:

The next day, rinse the peanuts thoroughly and transfer them into a pressure cooker with 8 cups of water. Depending on your pressure cooker, you might want to add more or reduce the amount of water accordingly. Use high heat to pressure cook the peanut soup for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to medium and cook for another 30-40 minutes. Turn off the heat and let cool until you are able to remove the lid of the pressure cooker. Heat up the sweet peanut soup again with medium to low heat, add rock sugar to taste. Boil it until the peanuts are thoroughly soft. Add the coconut milk towards the end, boil for 1 minute, turn off the heat and serve immediately.

This is not exactly a Nyonya recipe but I grew up eating lots of sweet peanut soup. My late parents, especially my late mother had a sweet tooth and she liked desserts and sugar-loaded foods. For supper (the time after dinner, about 10 pm), my family loved having tong sui (糖水), or literally means “sugar water” as our dessert. (Bee Koh Moy or sweet black sticky rice soup is a similar dessert.) Almost every night, my father or one of my elder brothers would go out to the Jelutong wet market to buy our favorite sweet peanut soup, or “tor tao jin th’ng.” So many years later, the same vendor is still selling at the same spot, with the best and most decadent sweet peanut soup and other tong sui in Penang. It’s my favorite dessert, one that I could have every night whenever I go home to Penang, and one that I always crave whenever I feel like having something sweet at 10 pm.

This is my home-made sweet peanut soup and the taste is exactly the same as the ones sold at Jelutong market. You need only a few ingredients: peanuts, water, and rock sugar. That’s all. I added a little bit of coconut milk to make it even creamier and richer. There are two tricks to make the peanuts melt in your mouth and completely dissolved: soak the peanuts overnight (to help soften the peanuts) and use a pressure cooker. Regular slow cooker will not work well as the peanuts will still be hard regardless of the long hours of cooking.

I served this sweet peanut soup to my good friends K & S recently, and after their first bowl, they both asked for more. It’s really that good! If you love sweet peanut soup like I do, do try to make it at home.