Hot and Sour Soup | Where does the "hot" in hot and sour come from? | The Woks of Life

A lot of people think that the hot in hot and sour soup comes from chili peppers. That is not the case. The hot in hot and sour soup is actually white pepper. If you've ever wondered while you're enjoying a bowl of hot and sour soup, what are all these little things that are floating in here with lots of different textures? I'm gonna tell you right now. Hi everyone, this is Sarah from The Walks of Life and today we are making that Chinese takeout classic hot and sour soup. In our family, we tend to judge a Chinese takeout restaurant based on this one soup. The restaurant's ability to get that exact right balance of sour, spicy in the soup, that really indicates quality. This is our family's restaurant version that my dad taught me how to make. It is my absolute all time favorite hot and sour soup I've ever had. We've had thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people try this recipe. They love it so much and they cannot believe that they've made such a high quality hot and sour soup at home. And it's actually pretty easy. A lot of people are surprised to hear we are using regular old distilled white vinegar. Hey, can I use Chinese black vinegar in this? Can I use seasoned rice vinegar? No. We're nice around the website and we're kind of like, you can use whatever you want. But for me, white vinegar is going to give that really clean, sour flavor in the soup. So on this side of the cutting board, I have all of the ingredients that are easily found in a regular grocery store and that you probably already have at home in your fridge and your pantry. You're gonna need a neutral oil, anything that doesn't have a strong flavor. You're gonna need soy sauce. You can find any soy sauce. Salt, sugar, an egg, scallion. We have pork here. Country style ribs, boneless. You could use pork loin, you could use pork butt. You can absolutely use chicken. If you don't eat meat at all, you can just leave it out. Cornstarch for thickening. White pepper, you can find this in any spice aisle. White pepper is gonna give that warming spice, not chili heat. You can put dried chili flakes or chopped dried chilies into your hot and sour soup and we do. But for me, when I'm seeing like mostly kind of red chili flake in there and I'm not tasting any white pepper, that's a big red flag for me. Better than bouillon, chicken bouillon paste. This is what we're using for our chicken stock today. If you wanna use a box or a canned stock, that's totally fine or if you wanna use homemade, even better. We love Better Than Bouillon. Honestly, I use it for a lot of things. And some sesame oil, which these days, you can find in a regular grocery store. And then a scallion for topping at the end. Okay, so now I'm gonna move on to the Chinese specialty ingredients. These are the things that you might have to venture into a Chinese grocery store for. The first is firm tofu. This is a non-negotiable. I have bamboo shoots here. If you can't find this canned bamboo shoot, you could use something like julienne broccoli stems, julienne kohlrabi even. They have like that kind of a similar crunchy texture. The next item is dark soy sauce, which this is optional. If you don't use this, your soup is gonna be lighter in color, but it'll still taste fine. I'm using mushroom flavored dark soy sauce here because we're using mushrooms in the soup. If you have regular dark soy sauce, that's totally fine. Even if you have like a Thai black soy sauce, that will work. If you have like a kicap manis, which is an Indonesian soy sauce that is dark, but also extremely sweet, I would just tread carefully with that one because it's gonna add sweetness to your soup. We do add just some chopped dried chilies to this recipe. This is totally optional. If you don't want that chili pepper heat, you don't need it. I have MSG, also an optional ingredient, but will give you that restaurant-y taste. And here I have pressed tofu. If you don't have it or can't find it, you can actually use firm tofu to make pressed tofu. It has a chewier texture. It just adds textural variation to the soup. My mom actually has a recipe for homemade pressed tofu. Check it out on our website. We'll link it in the description box below. So now we're gonna go on to the trio of dried ingredients in the soup. The first is the most basic. It is a dried shiitake mushroom. These need to be soaked either in hot water for about two hours, or you can soak them in cold water overnight. They add a lot of flavor to the soup. Of the three, this is the most important ingredient. That said, if you can't find them, you can substitute your regular old friendly button mushroom. If this were the only mushroom ingredient in your soup, it would be okay. If you found fresh shiitake mushrooms at your local grocery store, you could also use those, but they won't have the same strength of flavor as the dried. The next one is wood ears, and they have kind of a crunchy texture in the soup. And if you've ever wondered, like, what are those little black bits? It's these. And finally, we have dried lily flower. So this actually comes from the day lily plant. You soak them and then add them to soups. We actually have a steamed chicken dish that uses these. If you've had hot and sour soup and you've had this in there, you know that it is an important flavor. So these all need to be rehydrated, and I have my soaked ingredients here, the lily flower, the dried mushrooms, and the wood ears, and that is it. I know it seems like a lot, but really the soup is crazy easy to put together. I mean, you're gonna be shocked. Let's start with these dried shiitake mushrooms. So I'm just gonna take the mushrooms and I'm gonna squeeze the liquid out of them a little bit. These tend to have some sediment, so you wanna make sure that they're clean. So soaking your dry ingredients is the main sort of, I have to think ahead prep item. You can either soak them overnight, which is what I did. You just put them in a bowl, add cold water, and just leave it. Or you could do the same in the morning if you're planning on making that soup for dinner. Or if you're short on time, just put it into a heatproof bowl, pour boiling water over it, and soak it for about two hours, and then you'll be good to go. You can actually use the soaking liquid in the soup as part of your stock. I would not use the soaking liquid from the lily flower or the wood ears. It is not the same. So with these, I'm just gonna thinly slice. I like using the small ones in my cooking because then I can use them whole if I want, okay? Next, I will move on to the lily flowers. So these have a slightly specialized way that you have to handle them. There is a hard end. That's where the bud meets the stem. You're gonna want to cut that off because it's just kind of fibrous and not pleasant. And then with the remaining lily bud, you can just cut it in half. And what you can do to save time, you can line them up so that all of those tough ends are together. Lay them flat, and then you can cut them all off at the same time and then cut all of them in half at the same time. So the wood ears, like other dried mushrooms, can have some sediment. So I'm gonna rinse them. You want to pull it out and put it into the colander rather than pouring because when you pour, you just end up pouring the sediment on top of it. You can chop them. You can try to slice them or julienne them. And if you like them in bigger pieces, leave them in bigger pieces. That's the nice thing about making your own hot and sour soup. You can make it exactly how you like it. So next we have the pressed tofu. You only need three ounces. So that's about one of these little blocks. So I'm going to cut it in half through the middle so that the pieces that I get are thinner. And then I'm just gonna thinly slice it. And then the firm tofu. So I have a 14 ounce block here. You need about four ounces. I'm not gonna pour out all the water because I'm not gonna use all the tofu. And when I put it back in the fridge, you wanna store any leftover tofu in water. So basically I'm just gonna open this. I'm gonna take what I need and then I'm gonna put water back into it, cover it and put it back in the fridge. This is about the length that I want the rectangles to be. And then I'm just gonna cut like this. And this is medium firm tofu. So it's actually a little bit softer than regular firm tofu. Just wanna be gentle with the soup when you're stirring it. The next ingredient is a dried chili. I happen to know that these are extremely hot. They were dried ourselves from our garden last year. So I'm only gonna use one. As I said before, the heat from hot and sour soup is coming from primarily white pepper. This is just adding a little bit of that chili heat if you want it. If you don't want it at all, you can just leave it out. So I'm going to open this baby up and I'm gonna be very careful with it because I know how hot it is. And then I'm just gonna dump out the seeds. And now I'm just gonna chop it. That's it. What is your criteria for quality hot and sour soup? The first bite shouldn't be too sour. Okay, if the sour note hits to you first, that is not good. It should be a well-balanced, all the notes should be well-balanced, like the amount of heat and also the umami. Because a lot of times when it's too sour, you cannot taste the umami. So the umami, the heat, and followed by the sourness, that is the right balance for me. Yeah, you know, that's interesting because some people like it sour. So yeah, Sarah likes it sour. But you know, for me, a authentic hot and sour soup should really be spiced using white pepper and not red chili pepper. We have one chili pepper. One to two chilies is our recipe. Oh, well, we're wrong. No. I think that the chili, as the walks of life, like, I don't know, the editor and the person who's every walk of life. I am the encyclopedia of the walks of life. A little bit of that chili pepper, a little bit of that chili heat is nice. It is complimentary. However, it is optional and it is very much playing second fiddle to the white pepper. Oh, nice words. Second fiddle. So the thing is, you know, again, I don't like to harp on the words authentic too much. Okay, I think it's overused. It is whatever that you like, however you like it. That's how I feel. That's true. You know, all our recipes are a guideline. Yeah, a guideline. And if you say, oh, it's too this or too that, too sour, too salty, not enough salt, fix it. Now that we've done all those ingredients, we have the meat. I need four ounces. I have about a half pound here, so I just need half of it. As I said before, these are country ribs that I'm using. Country ribs are actually not ribs at all. They are boneless pork shoulder pieces. So the goal is to cut the pork into very small, thin strips. If I were smarter, I would have left this frozen so that I could cut the strips thinner and smaller. It is not frozen. It is fully thawed. So this is gonna be a little bit of a job, but if you wanna make slicing easier, don't thaw it all the way. So I'm just gonna start going this way, slicing against the grain. I'm just gonna thinly slice it lengthwise so that I get a strip. And they will shrink when they cook. Hot and sour soup has a lot of textures in it, which is a good thing, but you definitely wanna make sure that all of the ingredients are cut into a similar sort of size and shape. So if your family doesn't eat pork, you can absolutely use chicken here. I would use boneless, skinless chicken thighs. If you don't eat meat at all, just omit the meat entirely, and then you can replace it with some extra mushrooms, extra tofu, and use vegetable stock instead of chicken stock. I would recommend going for my Asian vegetable stock, which we will link in the description box below. So now I'm gonna add the pork to a bowl, and I'm gonna season it, and I'm gonna velvet it. So I'm adding a little bit of neutral oil here, and I'm gonna add the cornstarch. This mixture of oil and cornstarch is going to keep the meat from drying out. It's gonna give it that sort of like slippery, juicy texture, rather than sort of like a dry, unpleasant texture. I'm also going to add a little salt. So I think we call for an eighth of a teaspoon, and then I'm going to add a tablespoon of water. It's gonna sort of moisten the pork and make it really nice and tender. And now I'm just going to mix this all up until the pork fully absorbs the liquid. Last but not least is the scallion. I'm just gonna cut it over here, away from where I cut the meat. Now we're ready to make the soup. Hot and sour soup, egg drop soup, and wonton soup. Rank them. Hot and sour, egg drop, wonton. Depends on the quality of the wonton soup, but if it's a good quality wonton soup, I'd like the wonton soup, and then the hot and sour, and then the egg drop. My personal ranking is hot and sour, wonton, and egg drop. Rank them. Hot and sour soup, egg drop soup, wonton soup. Hot and sour, wonton, egg drop. I'm surprised by that. You love a wonton. I do love wonton soup, but if I'm judging the soup for its intrinsic qualities, hot and sour soup's number one. It's the most complex. It's the tastiest. I mean, I happen to love just those big, giant wontons, but you know, there's not much going on in the broth. I would say hot and sour soup's number one. In the day, there was no hot and sour soup. What? There was only egg drop, and there was only wonton soup. And then, you know, the specialty, like the sap gum wonton soups and stuff like that. But it's the times where the Chinese food diaspora, if you will, was evolving, and it was going away from Cantonese, plain Cantonese with lots of vegetables and things, into Sichuan style, or spicy foods. When my parents opened the Sun Hing restaurant, we made hot and sour soup. This had tofu, it had the wood ears, it had the lily flowers, and the pork, and I was like, wow, that's a lot of stuff. And of course, it also had the egg in it. It was complex. Yeah. Every day in the morning, first thing your grandfather would do is to make four things. A tub of hot and sour soup, and then a tub of egg drop soup, and a tub of egg foo yang gravy, and also a tub of the soup for the wonton soup. All on the steam table. Yes, it sits on the steam table, then the rice cooks, and then, you know what, when the lunch hits, there will be fried rice pre-cooked, okay, in the steam table as well. So when people order, say, beef broccoli with pork fried rice, you cook the beef broccoli, and then you scoop the rice, and it goes. What do they do with the leftovers? They're usually not much left over. It got dumped. If there was a little bit of leftover, we made it fresh every day. That stock looks great. So we're at the stove, and I have a pot of boiling stock behind me, and we're ready to cook this soup. One point before we move on is that you wanna be using a non-reactive soup pot. So you don't wanna use an aluminum pot. You wanna be using stainless steel, or I have ceramic. You could also use those glass pots. An enamel dutch oven will also work. The pork has been marinating for a while. It's sort of clumping together, so I'm just gonna add a little bit of water to loosen it up. Once it hits the soup, I want it to sort of be broken up into separate pieces. So my soup is simmering. I'm just gonna add it. If you see any foam or anything floating to the surface, you can skim that off. Now I'm gonna add the seasoning ingredients. First up is white pepper. I'm gonna add a teaspoon of it. I'm actually gonna do it sort of with my fingers. The white pepper tends to clump by breaking it up with your fingers. You just make sure that it distributes well in the soup. So I added a teaspoon of white pepper there, but you can add up to two teaspoons depending on how hot you like it. You could also just start with a teaspoon, taste, and then add more later. So now I'm gonna add a tablespoon of soy sauce. It's gonna start giving the soup that color. Two teaspoons of dark soy sauce, which is actually quite a bit. It's gonna make that soup really dark, but you'll see that when you add the vinegar, it's gonna lighten. I'm gonna add a teaspoon of sesame oil, half a teaspoon of salt. I actually went light on the salt because that Better Than Bouillon soup base is pretty salty and I can always add more later. So I'm gonna add about a quarter teaspoon of sugar and the dried chili. So MSG is a totally optional ingredient. You do not have to add it. This is basically synthesized glutamate, which is the substance in tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, seaweed, that creates umami. So if you've ever made Chinese food at home and you're like, why doesn't it taste as good? There's two reasons. One is wok hay, which is like that really high heat searing in the wok. And number two is this stuff. It's the MSG. We should normalize MSG bears like honey bears. This MSG bear means no harm. This sort of thing about MSG giving people migraines has been debunked. If you eat a processed product that has disodium guanylate, that's just another MSG like compound. Y'all be eating MSG, you don't know it. Now we're gonna stir in the lily flowers, wood ears and mushrooms. And I'm also gonna add the bamboo shoots. So I'm literally just open the can and I'm gonna drain it into the sink. The bamboo shoots add a really nice texture to the soup. Like we call for about four ounces. This is a five ounce can. I'm just gonna add it. This hot and sour soup recipe has always been in our top 10 recipes on the website. And it has also made it into our cookbook, The Woks of Life, Recipes to Know and Love from a Chinese American Family. We could only put a hundred recipes in here. Just goes to show how special a recipe this is. And also our readers probably would have come after us if we hadn't put it in. All those ingredients have cooled down the soup. So I'm just gonna let it come back up to a simmer. So we call for one third to half a cup of vinegar in this recipe. It totally depends on how sour you like your hot and sour soup. I personally, for myself, would just go straight to half a cup, but let's just start with a third. Actually, you know, if you have people in your family that like differing levels of sour, then just make the base soup less sour and then everybody else can just add vinegar. Okay, so we are back up at a simmer. I'm gonna add the vinegar and I'm gonna add the tofu. At this point, I'm gonna taste it because I'm pretty sure I wanna be adding that extra vinegar. Yeah, I'm just gonna add an extra splash. That warm white pepper heat, it's really nice. Okay, so I need a third of a cup of cornstarch and then I'm going to add some water to that, about a half a cup of water. And I'm gonna mix it really, really well into a slurry. So you just wanna make sure that there is no cornstarch lumps here. So you wanna be stirring the soup while you add this cornstarch. Otherwise, the cornstarch will sort of cook on contact and then you'll end up with cornstarch lumps in the soup. You do want the soup to be at a simmer while you add the cornstarch. So I'm gonna add about three quarters of it because you might not need all of it. And this thickens the soup and gives it that signature hot and sour soup consistency. And as you can see, combined, the vinegar and the cornstarch slurry have lightened the soup to the proper color. Also, if you find that you've added too much and it's too thick, you can just add more stock or water. At this point, you're gonna wanna taste it and then add a little more white pepper if you want, a little more vinegar if you want, more salt if you need. I don't know that that needs anything. Maybe a little dash of white pepper. If you're looking at the soup and you're like, huh, something's missing, that thing that's missing is the egg. You want the soup to be at a simmer when you add the egg. We just garnish it with scallions and we are ready to enjoy our delicious hot and sour soup. Okay, everyone, hot and sour soup is ready. Taste test. Don't all jump up at once. Pfft. Silence. Pfft. Hot and sour soup. Ooh, it's got a lot of good stuff in here. It's got all the stuff. Does it have the right balance for you? Could use more heat. More white pepper? I'll get it. So it's good for you. See, everybody likes- Oh! There you go. Okay, I'll take some, I'll take some. No, no, no, no, no, no. You want all that? Okay, go ahead. You crazy? Everybody likes their hot and sour soup slightly, you know, modulated differently. So you can put a bottle of vinegar on the table, your little white pepper on the table, and then everybody can adjust their soup according to how they like it. Fresh scallions brighten it up. Very nice. That little back- Yeah, the back of the throat heat. That little burn. Mm-hmm. That's the right note. I must be getting whippy in my old age. I like it the way it is. No comment. I've gotten more tolerant. Come a long way since I was a kid. Really? Oh, this pork is really nice. Mm-hmm. You good with it? Yeah. It has like a nice texture. It's not dry. And then the pork itself is seasoned. It has a little bit of salt. There are a decent number of ingredients in the soup, but at the end of the day, I think the process is pretty simple. It's really just all about dumping things into a pot. You've got a really high quality hot and sour soup that you know is good. Yeah, probably the toughest ingredient to get here is the lily flowers. Mm-hmm. They really add a nice earthiness. Also, you can get them online. All right? If you guys like this video, please like it and subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out more recipes on thewoksoflife.com. You notice when you add more vinegar, it lightens up the soup? Yes. I talked about that. What? I have no idea.