How To Make Hot and Sour Soup

This staple of Asian restaurants is quick and easy to make and to make gluten free. While soy sauce is almost exclusively used in restaurants, putting this dish off the menu for those of us with celiac or gluten intolerance, this soup is great made with Tamari.

Watch A Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Hot and Sour Soup

Ingredients For Hot and Sour Soup

• 3 Shiitake Mushrooms, sliced
• 1/4 Cup Woodear Mushrooms, sliced
• 2 Eggs
• 4 Cups Chicken Broth
• 1 small can Bamboo Shoots
• 6 oz Frozen Tofu Cubes
• 1/2 tsp Red Chile Flakes
• 1/4 tsp Hot Chile Powder (to taste)
• 1/4 tsp Black Pepper
• 2 Tbls Tamari
• 1/4 tsp Sugar
• 2 Tbls Corn Starch
• 3 Tbls Water
• 2 Tbls Vinegar
• 1/2 tsp Sesame Oil
• 1 Green Onion, Sliced

Soak The Dried Mushrooms

We’ll start by putting our mushrooms in a bowl, covering them with boiling water and soaking them for 15 minutes to soften them.

Mix the Eggs

Next we’ll crack the eggs into a bowl and scramble them with a fork. We want these to be ready when our soup is ready for them so we are doing this ahead.

Start the Soup

We’ll get the soup started by putting the chicken broth in a large stock pot. You’ll want to have plenty of room in the pot because we’ll be stirring it vigorously at one point. We’ll turn the burner to medium-high heat because we want the broth to boil.

Bamboo Shoots

While we wait for the broth to boil we’ll add our other ingredients, starting with the bamboo shoots. We use a whole 4 oz can, drain them and just leave them whole. You can also cut them smaller, in strips, if you prefer.

Frozen Tofu

We love to use frozen tofu for this recipe. Frozen tofu has a lot more texture and absorbs more of the soup flavor. When you freeze tofu the water in it freezes in bubbles and leaves air pockets when it melts. Then the soup penetrates these air pockets and fills the tofu with juicy flavor. We just cut tofu into bite sized cubes, put them on a cookie sheet and freeze. We’ll store the cubes in a freezer bag until we want to use them. We thaw them out first but you wouldn’t have to.

The Mushrooms

Next we’ll add our reconstituted mushrooms. Since the water we put on the mushrooms is now mushroom flavored we’ll just add the whole bowl to our soup.

Tamari

Next we add the Tamari. In restaurants we’ve only seen this soup made with soy sauce but since we are making this gluten free we are using Tamari which is basically a gluten free soy sauce.

Pepper and Chile Flakes

We are going to add a couple different kinds of pepper. First we’ll add red chile flakes. We’re using 1/2 teaspoon but you can add more or less to suit your taste. We’ll also add 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper. If you like your soup hotter you can also add some chile powder.

Sugar

We find that a lot of Asian recipes use a little sugar almost like you would use salt. The sugar is used to bring out a lot of the other flavors. For this soup we will just add 1/4 teaspoon to get that effect.

Corn Starch Slurry

While we wait for the soup to boil we will make a corn starch slurry which is our thickener. We’ll mix 3 tablespoons of water with 2 tablespoons of cornstarch in a small bowl. This way we can make sure it doesn’t have any lumps. We have found the best tool for mixing this is a small whisk.

Stir Slurry Into Soup

Once our soup has reached a full, rolling boil we will stir in our corn starch slurry. You want the soup to be boiling hard and the soup should thicken right away. If your soup isn’t boiling hard enough it won’t thicken properly. You’ll want to keep stirring for a minute or so to prevent lumps from forming.

Add the Eggs

Now we’ll turn down the heat and add our eggs. First we want to stir the eggs a little more because they have been sitting. Then we’ll make a whirlpool in our soup pot and pour the eggs in very slowly so we create ribbons of egg in our soup. If your whirlpool isn’t fast enough or you pour the eggs too fast you will get clumps of egg rather than ribbons. We’ll let this cook for a minute and then turn off the heat.

Vinegar

The sour in our hot and sour soup comes from the vinegar. We are using regular distilled white vinegar here but this is also good with rice wine vinegar. You may want to adjust the amount to get a little more sour in your soup.

Sesame Oil

We’re going to put a few drops of sesame oil as kind of a finishing oil on our soup. We’ll use toasted sesame oil for this as it has a stronger flavor that complements this soup well.

Green Onion

The last thing our soup needs is the sliced green onion. We’ll put these in, give it a good stir and our soup is ready to serve.

Serve

Hot and sour soup can be served simply by itself or you can serve it with a side such as fried rice. One Cook likes to add chile oil to his. Either way this is an enjoyable gluten free recipe for this restaurant classic.

If you enjoyed this recipe subscribe to our Youtube Channel and share on social media. Leave us a message and let us know of any other recipes you’d like to see us work on.

Print