Soup & Stew Atlas · Soup
Hot and Sour Soup
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, closing toasted and warm.
Ingredients
- 1.2L good chicken stock; 150g pork loin in fine shreds (or leave it out and lean on mushrooms)
- 8 dried shiitake, soaked and sliced (liquid reserved into the pot); 50g wood ear fungus, soaked, slivered; ½ block firm tofu in matchsticks; bamboo shoot slivers
- THE HOT: 1–2 tsp ground WHITE pepper: the heat here is pepper, not chili. THE SOUR: 4–5 tbsp Chinkiang black vinegar, added at the end
- 3 tbsp soy; 3 tbsp cornstarch slurry; 2 eggs, beaten
- Sesame oil, scallions, more white pepper at the table
The skills inside
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · egg · soy · sesame
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer stock with mushrooms, their soaking liquor, pork, tofu and bamboo, 10 min; season with soy. 10 min
- Thicken with the slurry to a glossy, spoon-coating body: hot and sour soup should have weight.
- Stream in the beaten egg in a thin ribbon while stirring SLOWLY in one direction, wide silk banners, not confetti.
- OFF the heat: the vinegar and white pepper, both fade if boiled; this is why restaurant versions taste brighter than tired homemade ones. Sesame oil; scallions; serve immediately.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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