Herbal Soup Attempt

Now that we have the thermal cooker, we are more keen to make soup for our meals. This weekend, we attempted chicken herbal soup. To simplify matter, we bought Yang Sheng Le Cordyceps Concentrated Herbal Soup for our soup base.


This Yang Sheng Le Cordyceps Concentrated Herbal Soup consists of and 冬虫草 (Cordyceps), 北沙参 (Bei Sha Shen), 北芪 (Bei Qi), 玉竹 (Yu Zhu) and 陈皮 (Chen Pi).







Direction to make this herbal soup was simple. Shake well bottle content and add into 1 liter of boiling water. Then add in about 600g of chicken. Simmer for 20 minutes before serving.


But this was what I found out.


1. Bottle content was so viscous, that it could not be shaken. I just scoped out the concentrate to the boiling water.


2. The herbal soup concentrate was very salty. I added more than 1 liter of water to dilute out the taste. Plus it had a very strong chicken essence taste which I didn't like at all.


3. You don't have to use 600g of chicken. What I did was with 3 chicken thighs. Removed the chicken skin to reduce the oil content and boiled the chicken first to remove the impurity.


4. I added more red dates and wolf berries for sweeter taste.


5. I let the soup really boiled with the chicken meat, red dates and wolf berries before transferring to my thermal cooker.









The end result.....












The chicken meat was tender and the soup tasted much better. However, I still prefer the traditional herbal soup with actual ingredients. Some things are not meant to be simplified.