Keyword: chinese watercress soup, watercress pork rib soup, watercress soup
Prep Time: 40 minutesminutes
Cook Time: 2 hourshours30 minutesminutes
Total Time: 3 hourshours10 minutesminutes
Servings: 8
Calories: 31kcal
Author: Bee Leng
Chinese watercress soup with honey dates is great to drink when you're down with headache, cough or flu. It's medicinal properties will ensure that you'll recover faster after drinking it!
Wash the pork and chicken bones, and chicken feet.
Blanch the pork bones in a small pot of boiling water for 10 mins. Then add the chicken bones and feet to blanch for another 3 mins. Discard the water and rinse the bones thoroughly, using a knife to scrap off remaining blood clots.
Separate the watercress leaves from the stalks. Discard leaves with black spots and remove any tiny roots from the stalks. Wash in a basin with a tsp of salt to get rid of any mud, then rinse thoroughly in tap water.
COOKING METHOD
Place the pork bones, chicken bones together with all the watercress stalks in the large pot of boiling water (2.5 litres). Boil for 1 hr on medium high heat.
Remove all the stalks from the soup. Then add in the leaves, sweet almonds, bitter almonds, chicken feet and honey dates and continue to boil over medium heat for another hour.
Lastly, add in the red dates and wolfberries and continue to boil for 15 mins. Ladle into bowls and serve.
Notes
MARKETING TIPS
Buy suo shi gu (锁匙骨) or bing bang ban (乒乓板) when cooking soup with pork bones, which you can get from your local butcher at the wet market. These two cuts of pork are good for soups, because even after the boiling, the meat on the bones still taste good when eaten because there is some fats (but not too much) to keep the meat tender and yet not make the soup oily.
Buy Indonesian pork (from the wet market) as tends to be leaner and sweeter than Australian pork, so the soup will not be oily.
Buy red dates with seeds. Firstly they are sweeter. Secondly pitted red dates, if stored too long at the shops, may have tiny insects and spider webs forming inside the centre hollow of the dates.
PREP TIPS
Blanch the pork bones to get rid of the blood clots. This removes the porky smell and ensure that the soup will not have a scum layer on top when cooked.
Add salt to the water for washing vegetables. It helps to get rid of all the sand, mud and dirt more easily.
BUT do not soak them in the salt water, otherwise, your vegetable will be very salty.
Don't eat the watercress stalks. The stalks are usually too fibrous to be eaten but they give a thicker and more flavorful taste to the soup.
Don't soak the wolfberries. Rinse them just before adding them into the soup otherwise they will become mushy.
COOKING TIPS
More water can be added to the soup but it must be hot boiling water so that the temperature will not drop suddenly, affecting the cooking time.
Red dates and wolf berries must only be added in during the last 15 minutes, because if you boil them for too long, it makes the soup a bit sourish.
ALTERNATIVES
More nan xing can be added to the soup but not the bei xing because of its bitterness. The almonds will still very crunchy and nice to eat even though they have been boiled for so long.
Dont add too many red dates if you want the soup to be more savory.
Alternatively, watercress soup can also be taken as sweet herbal drink ( 'leong cha') to cool the body heat.
In this case, both the leaves and stems are boiled together with red dates, nan xing bei xin and honey dates and 'zhou fu tong' ( soft dark brown sugar) for a shorter time like 1 hr. Discard all the ingredients, just drink the soup.