Chinese Egg Drop Soup with Seaweed

Vegetable broth

1. It is believed that Chinese egg soup should be made with chicken broth. That is more a common option than a rule. The soup can be made with any broth or stock. By and large, what matters in the soup is the egg set into wisps, and everything else is secondary.

   We will make the soup with vegetable broth. For a good vegetable soup or broth, take a carrot, a few soup roots (celery, parsnip, parsley), a potato, an onion and a few cloves of garlic. Do not add any spices or salt to the broth.

2. Wash all the vegetables thoroughly and peel them. The potato and garlic cloves can stay unpeeled, but scrub off any soil.

   

3. Cut the carrot and roots into large pieces, score the onion crosswise, and cut the potato with its skin into 4 pieces.

4. Put all the vegetables in a pot, add the unpeeled garlic cloves and cover with 1 l of cold water.

   

5. Bring to a boil over high heat, then simmer the vegetables under a lid over low heat for 30 mins. The broth should barely simmer.

6. Take all the vegetables out of the broth. The cooked vegetables can simply be eaten, as the egg soup doesn’t need them.

Seaweed and eggs

1. The soup cooks very fast, so get everything ready beforehand.

2. Measure the dried seaweed. It is usually sold in packs of 20-50 g, which is a lot for soup for two. Just take as much as you need so the soup isn’t too thick: 8-10 g of dried seaweed is enough for two servings.

   

   If you decide to make the soup with spinach, take a fairly large bunch. Scald the spinach with boiling water and cut it into thin strips.

3. Measure out the soy sauce and crack two eggs into a small bowl.

   

Cooking the soup

1. Bring the broth to a boil again and add the dried seaweed (or the chopped spinach). The seaweed soaks almost instantly and looks like fresh seaweed, just like what we are used to seeing when swimming in the sea. It is convenient to stir the seaweed with chopsticks, traditional in China and Asia. There’s no need to stir hard, just separate the seaweed so it doesn’t stick in clumps.

   

3. Add 2 tbsp of natural soy sauce. Soy sauce is quite salty, so the soup needs no salt at all.

   

4. Simmer the seaweed over low heat for 2-3 mins, stirring.

   

5. Beat the eggs with a fork until just mixed. There’s no need to use a mixer or beat them to a foam. Simply mix the eggs as you would for a filled omelet.

   

6. Keep stirring the gently simmering broth and seaweed with the chopsticks while pouring in the eggs in a thin stream. The eggs should set in the hot liquid, forming thin, long wisps or threads. This is easy to achieve, you just need to stir the broth constantly.

   

7. When all the eggs have mixed into the broth, cook the soup for 2-3 mins, stirring constantly.

Serving

1. Ladle the soup into small bowls or plates.

2. Finely chop the green onion and sprinkle it over the soup. Green onion goes superbly with this soup and gives it a wonderful flavor.

   

3. If you like, sprinkle with a pinch of coarsely ground hot red pepper, which tastes very good.

   

   In China such soups are eaten with chopsticks, first picking out the seaweed and egg, then eating the liquid with a spoon or drinking it straight from the bowl.