10 Essential Chinese Herbs in my Pantry (Part 1) | A Chinese Medicine Practitioner's Guide

If you want to start to incorporate Chinese herbs in your cooking and diet, what would be the herbs that you would keep in your pantry? Let me share my favorite top 10 Chinese herbs that are versatile, easy to use and easy to pair with other food or herbs. They are delicious and they can be used in your herbal tea or herbal soup or dishes to warm you up, to clear your heat or to push your energy, to calm your mind or to relieve minor symptoms. I got you covered in these 10 popular and safe Chinese herbs. Hi everyone, welcome to Chinese Herbal Pantry. My name is Shirley. I'm a Chinese medicine practitioner and a Western medicine pharmacist in Australia. This channel is about how to improve general well-being and to relieve minor symptoms by using Chinese herbs at home, effectively and most importantly, safely. You probably always are curious or believe in the healing power of Chinese herbs and are inspired to want to start incorporating Chinese herbs in your everyday cooking. You want to keep some delicious, nutritious and commonly used Chinese herbs in your pantry so they are there when you need them. But there are so many Chinese herbs, which one should you keep in your pantry? One of my online course students have asked these questions before which I already answered in this video. However, in that video, I literally just give them the 10 herbs without explaining what their functions and how to use it because they have gone through my course, they know what I'm talking about. But for some of you, you probably don't know what those herbs are, how to use them and this is why I'm creating this two-part video series, The Top 10 Herbs for Your Pantry. Please note that I will still go through the properties of the herbs, the Chinese medicine functions and how to use them quite quickly in this video, assuming that you already have some basic understanding of traditional Chinese medicine. Please do more reading and learning yourself with some credible websites and Chinese medicine books. If you are not that kind of person who can do self-study and would like to ask questions to someone that have experience, you can consider joining my online course which I'm going to teach soon. If you are interested to learn more about the course, please go to this link to join the waitlist so you'll be the first to notified when I launch my course. In this course, I teach you how to basically create your own Chinese herbal pantry and I'll give you recipe that suits you and teach you how to modify them for your own use. Okay, without further ado, let's start with the list. You can see on the screen here or you can see on the table here. These are the top 10 herbs or helpful food ingredient that I think will be great for your pantry. Of course, you don't have to buy them all at once. You can start with one or two, a few of them and then as you get more comfortable with cooking and learning and understanding the herbs and learning how your body responds to the herbs, then you can slowly build up your own Chinese herbal pantry. These 10 herbs have a variety of functions that are able to support your general well-being, to help you through the 4th season and to relieve minor symptoms if you learn the simple and appropriate combination that suits your own needs. These 10 herbs should be quite easy to find in your local Chinese herbal stores or local Asian grocery shop. I will talk about 5 herbs in this video and the other 5 in the next video. Otherwise, this video is going to be too long. So we're going to start with this plate which there are 5 herbs here. So the first one is the goji berry. So the goji berry in Chinese is 枸杞子 and in Cantonese sometimes we just call it 杰子. So the dermal property is neutral and we classify it as Yin Tonic. The Chinese medicine function is to nourish the essence, the Yin and the Chinese medicine blood and it also can support eye health. Many of you would have known or already heard about it or even tried it because it has made popular or even trendy in the West when it was found to be a type of superfood in recent years. Yet it has been used for thousands of years in Asia. Goji berries are widely available in many grocery shops now in Western countries or health food stores. I wish eventually many other Chinese herbs would be as accessible as goji berry now. So goji berry is neutral according to traditional Chinese medicine so you don't have to worry about it too much whether you are a cold or heaty person or whether you could use it. It tends to be quite safe and that's why in Australia a lot of them mix it with their granolas or their cereals in the morning. It is sweet and very easy to incorporate in your everyday diet. You could eat it as snacks, you can sprinkle to your cereal, your yogurt, your smoothie or you can make it as herbal tea. You could add them to your herbal soup. In my first video of this channel, it's actually goji berry and a chrysanthemum flower for eye health. The soup recipe that I share here often have a small handful of goji berry because that is give a gentle sweetness to the soup. It not only add the health benefits to the soup, it also make the soup more pleasant to our eyes because of its red color. They are so versatile hence they are truly loved by many. Okay and the second herbs I would recommend is medicine blood and calm the spirit. Its Chinese name is Hong Zao or Da Zao. Cantonese is Hong Zou. This one is another very popular Chinese herb. It's often used together with the goji berry and you can see in many of my soup recipe, I use them a lot together for the same reason. For its sweetness, for its color and for its additional health benefits which is for to tonify our qi and to tonify our Chinese medicine blood. And it's often healed to be able to add healthy color to a very pale face. So in Asia, a lot of women like to eat this. However, its thermal property is warm. So be aware if you are very prone to heat signs, don't use it that often or remove the pits because it will help to reduce the warmth. The other reason that it's very popular is also because it can calm our shen which means calm our mind or spirit. So we do use it for relaxation which I already explained in one of the video in this channel. You can go and watch how to combine with other herbs to enhance the shen calming or spirit calming properties. Okay, the third herb to keep in your pantry is ginger. Ginger is a food, it's a spice that everybody knows about it but you'll probably be surprised to hear ginger is considered a very important Chinese herb. Even in the medicinal herbal decoction, we do add ginger to our herbal decoctions. Ginger is classified as an exterior releasing herb. I have already briefly explained what it means in this video here. In the western medical term, the closest term or description that I can use to describe it is to relieve common cold symptoms but it's the common cold that we doubt source for because this herb is warming. I mean this is not exactly what it means in exterior releasing but it's close enough. So because this is warming, it's great for winter or any time that you need the warmth in your body especially when you feel the cold in the middle, I mean in the stomach area. I have also made a video on how to use ginger in everyday life and you can combine it with various different ingredients to enhance its function and flavor. You can use it to warm yourself up, to relieve minor common cold symptoms such as mild cough. You can also use it to relieve nauseous and vomiting or relieve mild period pain that is caused by cold. You can check out this video to learn more about it. So I think everyone should keep ginger in your pantry regardless of whether you believe Chinese medicine or not because basically it's a food and it's a spice that you can use in many dishes or tea. So the fourth Chinese herb that you should keep in your pantry is chrysanthemum flower. The Chinese name is chrysanthemum. Cantonese is chrysanthemum. So the thermal property of this is cool or cooling. It's also classified as a exterior releasing herbs. Many use it to clear heat because of one of the traditional Chinese medicine function, it's able to clear heat. It helps to relieve painful swollen and red eyes. It also can calm the Chinese medicine liver and it has a gentle relaxation or relaxing function for us. It's often brewed as Chinese herbal tea for the above signs and symptoms I just mentioned. I previously said that it can combine well with the goji berry to support our eye health when you are very tired with your eyes, dry eyes, red eyes or swollen eyes. In contrast to ginger, the chrysanthemum flower can help to relieve common cold symptoms that start with a sore throat or heat signs such as feeling warm at the start of the common cold or have constipation or yellowish mucus. But do note that if the yellowish mucus need to be checked by your doctor first or pharmacist to see whether it's a bacterial infection. Otherwise you can use the chrysanthemum flower to help you clear the heat signs in the early stage of the common cold that start with a sore throat. The other way to use the chrysanthemum flower is you can pair with other herbs such as some of the flowers that I suggested here in this video to help you to relax and to calm your mind. The fifth ingredient that you should keep in your pantry is the Shan Yao. Sometimes we call Huai Shan Yao in Cantonese is Huai Shan. The one that I keep here is the slightly different cut. This is just the cut and dry. It doesn't press it. A lot of them that you see or you can buy from your herbal shop that is like nice long flat Huai Shan. Those are the slightly different way of processing. They cut it and they press slack. This one is just cut without pressing which I start using they're quite good. So less processing is good and you can also easily find the fresh one this day in your market. Chinese yam's thermal property is neutral. It's classified as a qi tonic. It can tonify the Chinese medicine spleen, lung and kidney qi. It's often used for general well-being. It can also help to relieve fatigue, blue stool due to weak digestion, lack of appetite or mild sore back. We often use in Chinese herbal soup. The flavor is actually very gentle. It doesn't overpower the flavor of other ingredients in the soup. So it can easily combine with a lot of other herbs. It's called Chinese yam because it's actually a food ingredient in China. If you can find a fresh version, you can shred it, slice it and stir-fry with other vegetables or you can simply put in your soup like adding potatoes in your soup because these also have a starchy property. So will kind of gently thicken your soup. It is quite nice to have it in your soup. In one of my video here, it's one of the four herbs for the four minister soup to use for general well-being or to boost our energy and our immunity. Okay that's all for this video. So don't forget to subscribe and click the notifications bell. So when I release the second video, you will be notified immediately. If you find this video helpful and valuable to you, don't forget to give it a thumbs up and please share with your friends and family if they are also interested in learning Chinese herbs or using Chinese herbs at home. So I'll see you in the next video then. Bye!