Kidney Jing Chicken Soup

From Omi's Kitchen

Kidney Jing Chicken Soup

Jing is the Chinese medicine idea closest to constitutional reserve. It's understood to decline gradually across a life, at different rates in different people — which is the same argument this week's episode makes about the thirty-five number, arrived at from the other direction.

The ingredients here are the ones the tradition has always reached for when someone is depleted: bones and marrow, black beans, chestnuts, walnuts, black sesame. This is a soup, not a treatment. It's what I make in cold weather when someone has been running on empty.

It is also, unlike most tonic soups, actually good. Food-therapy recipes have a reputation for tasting like obligation, and that reputation is earned — so the technique below matters as much as the ingredient list.

Makes about 3 quarts · 6 servings · 3 hours, mostly unattended

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken (3–4 lb), cut up — or 2 lb bone-in thighs plus 1 lb wings or backs
• 2 chicken feet, optional, and they do more for the body of the broth than anything else here
• 3 tbsp Shaoxing wine — or see the substitution note below for an alcohol-free version
• 6 dried shiitake — and keep the soaking water, it's the backbone of the whole thing
• 6 jujube (red dates), torn open
• 2 tbsp dried scallop or dried shrimp, optional and worth it
• ½ cup dried black beans, soaked overnight
• 10 dried chestnuts, soaked 30 min — or 1 cup peeled frozen
• 1 oz dried Chinese yam (shan yao), soaked 30 min — or 1 cup fresh, peeled, in chunks
• ½ cup walnut halves
• 1 piece astragalus (huang qi), optional
• A 3-inch knob of ginger: half in thick slices, half saved for grating
• 3 scallions — whites for the pot, greens sliced for serving
• ¼ cup goji berries
• 2 tbsp black sesame seeds
• White pepper, toasted sesame oil, salt

Method

1. Soak the shiitake in 2 cups hot water, 30 minutes. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve and save every drop. Slice the caps. This liquid is most of the flavour in the finished soup — throwing it out is the single most common way this kind of soup ends up tasting like nothing.
2. Blanch the chicken. Put the pieces in a pot, cover with cold water, add 1 tbsp of the wine, bring to a boil and let it go 2–3 minutes. Drain, rinse the pieces and the pot. This is the difference between a clear broth and a cloudy one.
3. Char the aromatics. Dry pan, no oil, high heat. Lay in the ginger slices and scallion whites and leave them until they're blackened in patches — 3 or 4 minutes a side. Don't be timid; the scorching is the point and it gives the broth a smoky depth you can't get any other way.
4. Toast the walnuts and sesame in the same dry pan, separately, a couple of minutes each, until they smell nutty. Set both aside.
5. Combine the chicken, shiitake and their liquid, jujube, dried scallop, black beans, chestnuts, yam, astragalus, charred ginger and scallion whites, and the remaining 2 tbsp wine. Add water to cover by an inch or two — about 3 quarts total including the mushroom liquid. Add 1 tsp salt now, not just at the end: salt added early seasons the chicken and beans themselves, and salt added only at the end sits on top of the broth.
6. Bring to a bare simmer and skim what rises. Keep it barely bubbling for 2½ to 3 hours, partially covered. A hard boil clouds the broth and toughens the meat.
7. Last 30 minutes: add the toasted walnuts. Any earlier and they go bitter and stain the broth brown.
8. Last 10 minutes: add the goji berries. Longer than that and they turn to mush.
9. Off the heat: grate in the reserved ginger. Season properly — more salt than you think, a good amount of white pepper, and a teaspoon of toasted sesame oil. Taste it. If it's flat, it's almost always salt, and occasionally a splash more wine.
10. Serve with scallion greens and toasted black sesame over each bowl. 

Notes

If you don't have Shaoxing wine, or you'd rather not cook with alcohol. The wine is doing two jobs: the alcohol strips the gamey note off poultry bones, and the aged rice brings a fermented, faintly sweet depth. Dry sherry is the closest swap, same quantity, if alcohol isn't the concern.

To leave it out entirely: use 1 tbsp unseasoned rice vinegar in the blanching water in place of the wine, and replace the 2 tbsp in the pot with 1 tbsp light soy sauce plus 1 tsp rice vinegar. The soy covers the fermented depth, the vinegar gives the lift, and the blanch and the charred ginger handle the rest. The broth will come out a shade darker. If you want to keep it pale, use 2 tbsp white grape juice and 1 tsp rice vinegar instead — less savoury, but closer to the wine's sweetness.

In a three-hour simmer the alcohol has long since cooked off. But if you're pregnant or trying and would rather not have a bottle of wine near the pot at all, the substitution above is a real version of this soup, not a consolation prize.

The jujube are doing the sweetening. Without them the soup is mineral and flat — all bones and beans, no round edge. Don't skip them.

If you want to eat the chicken rather than spend it on the broth, pull the pieces at 90 minutes, shred the meat and return it at the end. Otherwise let it go the full three hours and accept that the meat has given everything it had.

To make it a meal, ladle it over rice, or add greens — bok choy, pea shoots, spinach — in the last 5 minutes. A spoon of chili oil on top is not traditional and is very good.

Keeps 4 days in the fridge and freezes well. The beans and chestnuts thicken it as it sits; thin with water when you reheat, and re-season, because reheated soup always needs more salt.

Shiitake, jujube, dried scallop, chestnuts, dried yam, astragalus and goji are all easiest to find at an Asian grocery, where they cost a fraction of what the health food store charges.

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