Princess V and I watched a cooking program, recently, in which the cooks demonstrated how home cooks anywhere in the United States can make more-or-less authentic-tasting hot-and-sour soup. Their recipe was interesting, but a lot of their substitutions struck me as unnecessary and, ultimately, unsuccessful. I feel strongly that, if you want to make a hot-and-sour soup, your results will be most satisfying if you stay with the traditional ingredients. Hot-and-sour soups vary a bit from restaurant to restaurant, but the most exotic ingredients in a typical hot-and-sour soup are black vinegar, daylily buds, and sliced black fungus. Now, I can see where those items might be difficult in a small town, but I know a half-dozen grocery stores in Austin that carry these ingredients, and that's not counting the Asian specialty markets. If all else fails, you can always order these items through the Internet, and they're not expensive items.
Thinking about (and, yes, disagreeing with) the cooking show got me mulling over what I like and dislike about hot-and-sour soup. My first experience with hot-and-sour soup, twenty years ago, was in a Chinese restaurant in, of all places, Vermont. Their version contained fresh cloud ears and fresh lily buds. Cloud ears are similar to—but lighter, more flavorful, and harder to come by than—wood ears, the more common variety of what is generically marketed as black fungus.
The name sounds generic, and many regional and national cuisines do include a soup that is essentially both hot and sour. Thailand's tom yum gets its heat from bird chilis and its tartness from lemon grass, galanga, and keffir lime leaves. hot chilis and horse radish. Philippine sinigang gets its heat from fingerhot chilis and its tang from tamarind. Yucatan's sopa de lima gets its sourness from limes; heat is added by spooning in fresh pico de gallo.
Remarkably, delicious though they may be, none of these other spicy sour soups has much in common with the hot-and-sour soup popular in American Chinese Cuisine. Hot-and-sour soup recipes vary a bit, but most rely on white pepper for their heat rather than any kind of chilis. The resulting burn builds more slowly than the heat from a capsicum, and white pepper provides a piney note. I have had hot-and-sour soups that rely on chili oil or red chili flakes, but those are the exception. Hot-and-sour soup—rather than relying on the citrus and other tart fruits and vegetables typically used in spicy sour soups—gets its unique tartness from black vinegar. Black vinegar, brewed from black glutinous rice, has a distinctive flavor: slightly sweet, a bit smoky, faintly like molasses, and with a distinct taste of malt. Hot-and-sour soup is both hot and sour like no other soup.
Hot-and-sour soup is also, frankly, somewhat unappealing in appearance. It's brown and tan and gooey-looking. The only color, typically, is a small scattering of scallion. It doesn't look the least bit appetizing. Hot-and-sour soup pretty thoroughly ignores the French maxim that you feast with your eyes first.
Fortunately, the Chinese know a thing or two about enlisting our other senses in their foods.
Although Chinese acquaintances have assured me that hot-and-sour soup is an American Chinese invention, hot-and-sour soup does incorporate a lot of the best elements of Chinese cuisine. In addition to the balance of hot, sweet, sour, and salty elements, hot-and-sour soup balances the hot yang of white pepper with the bland coolth of tofu (or tofu skins, in some cases).
More impressive than those balances, however, is the delightful play of textures in the best hot-and-sour soups. The softness of tofu and egg-drop strands parallels the chewiness of pork tendon and black fungus, the crunch of bamboo shoots and daylily buds, and the slipperiness of the corn starch used to thicken the broth. Asian cuisines have a lot to teach European and American cuisines about incorporating and balancing textures. A frequent American foodie's complaint about black fungus is that it has little or no flavor, but that's not the point of black fungus. In hot-and-sour soup—as in so many other dishes—black fungus is a pivotal element in the interplay of textures: black fungus invites your teeth to nibble and test and then breaks cleanly when they sink into it.
So What Am I Gonna Do About It?
Initially, yes, the cooking show inspired me to try my hand at a hot-and-sour soup. The more I thought about it, though, the more I wanted to try something a little different. I wanted something more substantial than a soup, and I wanted something with a bit more visual appeal. I decided to promote the pork to a point of prominence, and—though I knew I would be drastically modifying one of the textural elements—I substituted pork tenderloin for the tendon.
Since I was already promoting tendon to tenderloin, I decided to demote the broth to a sauce. This dish, then, is my riff on a classic: deconstructed hot-and-sour soup. Although—as I mentioned earlier—hot-and-sour soup typically looks less than appetizing, I wanted this dish to incorporate the flavor and texture elements of a hot-and-sour soup while still making a strong visual presentation.
Hot-and-Sour Pork with Charred Tofu
(serves three)
dramatis personae
one pork tenderloin (one pound or so)
six cups cold water
one quarter cup table salt
two tablespoons light brown sugar
one pint low sodium chicken stock
one block extra firm tofu
one half cup black fungus, julienned
one half cup daylily buds
one half cup bamboo shoots, julienned
one third cup black vinegar
two teaspoons toasted sesame oil
one teaspoon fresh-cracked white pepper
one scallion, chopped
one half pound egg vermicelli
one quarter cup peanut oil
quality of ingredients
Unless you're using your own chicken stock, use low sodium stock or broth. It's going to concentrate quite a lot, and salted stock will result in a gaggingly salty sauce.
My preference is for fresh black fungus. The texture of fresh black fungus has a velvety element that disappears when it's dried. Still, the rehydrated black fungus is better than none.
Canned bamboo shoots are okay. The Asian markets occasionally have whole shoots packed in salt water, and these are usually a bit more succulent than the canned strips. In either case, bamboo shoots should be drained and thoroughly rinsed.
I've seen fresh daylily buds in hot-and-sour soup just once, and the chef in that case grew his own. Fresh daylily buds have a brighter flavor and a slightly less fibrous texture than the rehydrated ones, but the rehydrated buds are still tasty. If you find a source for the fresh ones, by all means use them. And tell me how to contact your source.
Yes, it has to be white pepper.
preparation notes
Brine the tenderloin: combine the pork, water, salt, and brown sugar in a gallon Ziploc bag. Express as much air as possible from the bag, and refrigerate the tenderloin for one hour to allow the brine to season the meat thoroughly.
Slice three half-inch slabs of tofu from the block. Place the slabs on a flame-safe surface. I used an upside-down cookie sheet (not a non-stick sheet). With a paper towel, gently pat the tofu dry. With a propane or butane torch, lightly char the surface and edges of the tofu slabs. Don't char the whole surface black; you want to see some blistering and a little mottling. This will suffice to give the tofu a slightly toasty flavor. Besides, it looks cool.
Soak, for at least thirty minutes, a cup of dehydrated daylily buds in two cups of hot water.
If you're using dehydrated black fungus, soak, for at least thirty minutes, a loosely packed cup of fungus in two cups of hot water seasoned with a tablespoon of table salt.
See my directions in Evolution for frying the noodles.
Preheat the broiler to 500F.
Once the tenderloin has marinated for a full hour, thoroughly rinse and pat it dry. Trim and set aside the fat and silver skin.
In a skillet or sauté pan over a medium flame, heat two tablespoons peanut oil to smoking. Fry the reserved pork fat and silverskin until any attached bits of meat are brown. Push aside the browned bits of fat to make room for the tenderloin, turn up the flame to medium high, and lightly brown the tenderloin on all sides (no more than a minute on each side). Pour in the stock and black vinegar, and bring the liquid to a boil. Turn the liquid down to a simmer and braise the pork for two minutes. Turn the tenderloin over and continue braising for another minute. Remove the tenderloin to a plate and allow it to rest for five minutes.
Dissolve the cornstarch in two tablespoons of the braising liquid and set it aside.
Bring the liquid back up to a boil and, with a wooden spoon, deglaze the bottom of the pain. Once the majority of the brown bits are freed from the bottom of the pan, remove the skillet from the fire, and strain the braising liquid through a wire mesh strainer or chinois into a heat-safe, non-reactive container (a Pyrex bowl or an enameled pot). Discard the strained solids and return the liquid to the skillet. Drain and rinse the vegetables (fungus, daylilies, and bamboo) and pour them into the braising liquid. Stir in the sesame oil and a half-teaspoon of white pepper, and braise the vegetables over a medium flame while the tenderloin broils.
Brush the tenderloin with peanut oil and season it liberally with fresh-cracked white pepper. Broil the tenderloin fore three minutes, turn it over, and broil it for an additional three minutes. Remove the tenderloin to a cool plate to rest for five minutes.
Strain the vegetables from the braising liquid and return the liquid to the heat. If the liquid has not reduced by at least half (to about a half-cup), bring it to a boil. Stir the liquid occasionally while it reduces. Stir in the cornstarch slurry. Once the sauce begins to thicken, remove it from the heat.
Slice the tenderloin into quarter-inch thick slices.
Atop each noodle wedge, mound a half-cup of the vegetables. Lay a five or six overlapping slices of tenderloin atop each mound of vegetables. Drizzle a little of the sauce over the tenderloin slices and top them with one slab of charred tofu. Drizzle a little more sauce over the tofu and top with a scattering of scallion.
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