Chinese Tomato Soup

The sweet-and-spicy takeaway soup, made at home in a pot big enough to freeze half of it for a rainy day.

  • A big pot
  • ~2½ hrs (mostly waiting)
Chinese Tomato Soup, plated up

A zoet-pittige (sweet-and-spicy) soup that I make in industrial quantities so the freezer always has a bowl waiting. It looks like a long recipe. It is mostly the pot doing the work while you do something else.

Ingredients

  • A good glug of olive oil
  • 1.5 kg sieved tomatoes (passata)
  • 4 chicken legs
  • 2 chicken stock cubes
  • 4 onions
  • 3 garlic cloves (or double to 6 if you're like me)
  • 60 g sugar
  • 60 ml ketjap manis (sweet Indonesian soy sauce)
  • 40 ml white vinegar
  • 40 ml sambal (chilli paste)
  • 5 cm fresh ginger
  • 3 g ground lemongrass
  • 21 g cornflour (cornstarch)
  • 150 g mihoen (rice vermicelli)

Method

  1. Finely chop the onion, garlic and ginger and sweat them in olive oil in your biggest soup pot.
  2. Add the chicken legs and let the skin catch a little colour on the bottom of the pot.
  3. Pour in enough water to cover everything, crumble in the stock cubes, and let it simmer for at least 2 hours. Stir now and then and top the water back up so nothing's left high and dry.
  4. While that bubbles away, stir the sugar, ketjap, vinegar, sambal, lemongrass and cornflour into a paste.
  5. Fish out the chicken, pull the meat and skin off the bones, shred it small, and tip it back in.
  6. Stir in the flavour paste and the sieved tomatoes, then cook for another 30 minutes.
  7. Add the mihoen 15 minutes before serving, so it softens but doesn't dissolve into oblivion.

Tip: best mopped up with a garlic bread straight from the oven. (the cheap one from a packet. no notes.)