Superior Double Boiled Chinese Cabbage Soup
Since Chinese New Year is approaching where everyone is whipping up their best dish, I thought I would share another lunar festive recipe again. The Chinese long cabbage is always in abundance during the lunar festival and most households will commonly stock up this vegetable, usually for soup broth in Pen Cai or just purely for hotpot purposes. And so with a little twist, I used it in a double boiled soup where the soup ingredients are wrapped and cooked within the cabbage itself. Thereafter the leaves of the cabbage are opened up liked a “soup bowl” which make it very presentable and pretty.
The gist of this dish itself is actually the presentation of the cabbage and soup at the end of it. While I had the soup ingredients with some of the common items that we often stocked up in the fridge liked mushrooms, carrots, chicken and meatballs, you are free to replace them with anything of your choice. Usually I preferred to incorporate the water that’s being used to soak mushrooms and scallops into the cooking itself as they are natural seasoning, so be sure to give them a rinse first before soaking them to use.
The “double boiled” in Chinese cooking also meant that the soup is steamed over 2 layers of segregation and in this case, the real soup bowl is one and the “cabbage soup bowl” is another. 2 hours is quite a bare minimum for double boiling over the stove but there are also ready electrical appliances in the market that caters to such usage which probably can shorten the time. Hope this recipe is in time for the CNY menu planning !