Suan La Tang (酸辣汤) Hot and Sour Soup has many different exciting flavor combinations; sour from the vinegar, savory from the broth and hot and spicy from the white pepper.

One of our favorite recipes from this cookbook is Suan La Tang (酸辣汤) Hot and Sour Soup. We adjusted this recipe to make it easier to assemble. Chinese hot and sour soup is usually pork based, and often contains ingredients such as day lily, dried wood ear fungus, bamboo shoots, tofu, vinegar, and white ground pepper.  Many of these items can be exchanged or left out without too many changes to the taste and quality of the recipe.

However, there are 2 ingredients that make this Hot and Sour Soup special and they are...1) Chinkiang Vinegar (rice based black vinegar is a famous vinegar from the city of Zhenjiang) It is a dark complex vinegar that just cannot really be substituted. 2) ground white pepper. We feel that these 2 special ingredients cannot be substituted as they are the bones to this delicious soup.

Just as a heads up Chinkiang vinegar (black rice vinegar) is NOT gluten-free. If you are celiac, you will need to sway away from the dark vinegar and go with a gluten-free rice wine vinegar instead.

We understand that it may be difficult to obtain day lily and dried wood ear fungus, so we have left them out of this recipe but if you can get your hands on these ingredients be sure to add them as they are delicious.  We like using the dried mushrooms because we use the mushroom broth created from the reconstituting of the dry mushrooms right in the soup base. Really delicious! If you want to make this recipe lower in carbohydrates exchange the cornstarch and water slurry with an additional egg streamed in and it will make it thicker and velvety.

Mid-Autumn Festival is right around the corner. Are you ready? We are going to be enjoying our Apple Pecan Spring Roll Mooncakes,  Snowy Mooncakes  and tea (cha) and enjoying the bright brilliant moon.