Spicy Chicken & Vegetable Noodle Soup

It’s ages ago now that I actually cooked this - a good couple of weeks anyway - so I can’t really recall if there was a particular reason for it. Probably I just felt like something healthy and had spring greens & mooli to use up. And of course I do love a good Asia inspired broth or soup!

I scribbled this down while cooking at the time but it very much looks like a mix of two previous soups I’ve posted here and here, with slight adjustments to ingredients and quantities because of using chicken rather than beef or salmon. I wasn’t sure initially if I’d entirely pulled it off but I’m happy to report that it definitely grew on me.


Spicy Chicken & Vegetable Noodle Soup
Serves 2

140g chicken, sliced into fairly thin strips
2 tsp of sesame oil
2 large garlic cloves, chopped
1 inch knob of ginger peeled & chopped
2 birds eye chillis, deseeded, deveined and cut into slivers (plus extra for garnish if you like)
1 litre weak chicken stock (ie use half the amount of stock to water that the instructions suggest)
4 spring onions, finely chopped & a quarter of the green parts reserved for garnish
2 tsp chili bean paste (douban jiang)
1 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp fish sauce
1 whole star anise (plus ½ if you happen to have loose bits)
1 tsp palm sugar
½ tsp Sichuan peppercorns
2 tbsp Shaoxing wine
freshly ground white pepper
1 nest of dried noodles (about 50g)
100g mooli, cut into thin rounds
70g shitake mushrooms (about 6), thinly sliced
5 babycorn, sliced on the diagonal
large handful of spring greens, shredded
juice of ½ lime
chopped fresh coriander

Heat the sesame oil in a large saucepan over a fairly low heat then add the garlic, ginger, chilli and spring onions and sauté gently for about a minute.

Add the chili bean paste and stirfry for about 30 seconds. Splash in the wine then add the stock, the soy and fish sauces, star anise, sugar, the peppercorns and the mooli.

Bring the soup to a boil then reduce heat to medium-low and gently simmer for 10 minutes. Add the babycorn and simmer for 10 mins more. Then mix in the chicken & mushrooms. Cook for a further 15 minutes until the chicken is tender and the mooli is cooked.

Look at the state of that saucepan!

Adjust the seasoning, adding more soy sauce, salt or sugar if required plus some freshly ground white pepper.

Finally add the noodles and simmer until the noodles are cooked (about four minutes) and then stir in the the lime juice. Spoon into large bowls and sprinkle over with the chopped coriander and spring onions, and perhaps some slivers of chilli.