Bok choy broth with pickle

zha cai qing cai tang 榨菜青菜汤 This is a soup I fell in love with during a staff supper at the Dragon Well Manor restaurant in Hangzhou. It is one of those genius Chinese dishes in which humble ingredients yield delightful and sophisticated flavors. In essence, it’s a cabbage-and-cabbage soup, but it matches leaf cabbage with stem cabbage, fresh with fermented, so the refreshing juiciness of the green leaves is lit up by the salty-umami undertones of the pickle. Do try it.

Uh-oh! We're unable to calculate nutrition for this recipe because some ingredients aren't recognized.

Step 1

Rinse the preserved vegetable well to remove any chilli. Cut it into 2–3mm slices, then 2–3mm slivers. Trim the bok choy. If the heads are large, cut them widthways into ½–1 in (1–2cm) ribbons. If they are very small, simply halve or quarter them lengthways.

Step 2

Heat the oil in a seasoned wok over a high flame. Add the preserved vegetable and stir-fry briefly until it smells wonderful. Add the stock, bring to the boil and boil for a minute or so to allow the pickle to flavor the broth. Add the bok choy and boil until tender. Season with salt and pepper—you probably won’t need much salt because the pickle is salty. Serve.

Step 3

Preserved vegetable soup with slivered pork Cut some lean pork into slivers add it to the broth with the preserved vegetable;

Step 4

omit the greens.