Cooking: Sour Soup with Fatty Beef

The saying that “premium ingredients often need the simplest cooking method” hits harder with this dish than with anything else I cook.

It’s really not much work at all, but there are exactly two things to get right:

• You need 「yellow lantern chili sauce」— this is the core of the flavor. If you don’t have it, a 「sour soup beef seasoning packet」 works just as well; it’s basically the same sauce inside
• Good-quality sliced fatty beef. The quality of the beef directly decides how this dish eats

Everything else is ordinary stuff:

• Enoki mushrooms
• Baby napa cabbage
• Scallion, bird’s eye chili, ginger, garlic

First, blanch the washed enoki and baby napa in boiling water, drain them well, and lay them across the bottom of a plate.

Then fry the yellow lantern chili sauce together with the garlic and ginger in hot oil until it smells good — you can throw in chopped bird’s eye chili too. Once the aroma comes up, add two bowls of water. When it boils, drop in the sliced beef. Once the beef is cooked, pour the whole pot of soup over the plate you already lined with napa and enoki. That’s a plate of sour soup beef done.

Like I said, the core is the yellow lantern chili sauce and the good beef. The first decides the taste, the second decides the texture. Have both and you’ll easily turn out a decent meal. Even if you forget to fry the chili sauce first, the sauce alone is tasty enough that the dish can’t really go wrong.

At the end you can sprinkle some chopped scallion on top, like I do.

This one goes great with rice. The female teacher wouldn’t stop praising it.