How To Make Chinese Chicken Soup

Essentially, you could have hundreds of different types of chicken soup, and it's all from the same base. I've got here some shiitake mushrooms, they've been soaked in hot water, a couple of slices of ginger, and egg, some chicken breast, and here, some cream style sweet corn. I'm just going to show you how to shred the chicken breast up.

We don't need all of it. We're just going to make a small bowl, so I'm just going to take the fillet off. And just open it up a little, see.

And this shredded chicken will be to sort of put into the soup in the last ten minutes, just so that you get a nice bite of the chicken for your chicken soup. Okay, I'm just going to put a little bit, and just keep opening slowly. With the knife here, it's good to sort of stroke through the chicken, rather than saw too much.

Because if you saw, then you're just sort of hacking into the meat, which is not what you want to do. So I'm just opening that up as much as possible, okay, and then you can just start cutting nice thin strips into it. So, I've got this homemade chicken stock here but as I said, you can use normal chicken stock cubes; that's absolutely fine as well.

Alright, so your shiitake mushrooms, they can go, and your ginger, they can go straight into your soup. It's very, very simple stuff. Because pretty much it's a one pot wonder, you just throw everything in.

Alright, so we bring that to a boil. Give that a good mix. There's not been any salt in there yet, I haven't seasoned it.

I'll season it up in a second. Your cream style sweet corn, that can all go straight in. And obviously, the corn's gone in, and it's at room temperature.

So, the actual stock itself would've lost quite a lot of temperature. So, you want to bring it to a good boil again, and then you want to let it simmer for about 30 minutes minimum. To be honest, the longer you simmer it, the better.

And if you need to keep adding a bit of stock, that's fine. And it will just really taste nice and sort of strong in that chicken sense, yeah. Right, so your soup's been bubbling away for a good sort of 20 minutes or so, so I'm going to pot the chicken straight into your boiling soup.

I'm just going to season up the soup a bit as well. So, just a pinch of salt at a time. Let it bubble through and then taste, and season it to your taste.

And usually, once that's bubbling through, you get to use this time to crack your egg and give it a good beat. So, just crack your egg into a small bowl and beat it up. And we're going to sort of whisk this egg straight into the soup just before we serve.

And it will have just nice sort of whisks of egg. It will be lovely. The egg can go.

Right, so check on this chicken. Now, the cream style sweet corn actually has sort of corn starch in it, but it doesn't always make your soup as thick or as dense as you want it to be. So, another way to thicken up a little bit more is have your corn starch.

I'll just put a tablespoon of corn starch in there with a little bit of water, and just mix it through. Again, as we put it into the soup, I would go sort of gradually, so spoon by spoon until it's your desire, it reaches your desire of thickness. So, that's it, so half an hour, your chicken soup has been boiling away, and if you want it to get longer and get more flavour out of it, you can do.

But half an hour usually does the job. You want to get your whisks of egg in. So, boil away for about half an hour, bring it to a good bubble.

And when you get your egg it, you just want to pour it in slowly while mixing around with your fork. So, gradually drop your egg in, and keep mixing with your fork. That's it.

It's looking lovely. So, that's one egg mixed into your soup. Then, you can set it up. .