Name: Vietnamese Hot-and-Sour Soup of Duck and Bamboo Shoots
Yield: for 4 as a first course or 2 as a main meal with rice or noodles
Cuisine: Asia
Ingredients: 1 tsp chilli flakes; 60–115 g/ 2–4 oz sliced bamboo shoots; 1.1 litres/ 2 pt chicken stock or cold water; 1 tsp fish sauce (nam pla); 3 tbsp lemon juice or lime juice; 175 g/ 6 oz water spinach, trimmed; 1 or 2 limes, cut into wedges, to serve; salt and pepper; 2 tbsp groundnut oil; 2 large duck breasts, with skin; Crisp–fried Ginger, to garnish; 1 lemon grass stalk, cut across into 3; 5 cm/ 2 in piece of ginger, thinly sliced

Preparation info

for
4
as a first course

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

New Wave Asian

By Sri Owen

Published 2002

About

Hot and sour make up the favourite combination for all savoury cooking in Southeast Asia. This is certainly so in soups – everyone knows the Thai tom yam. There are hot-and-sour soups in China, in Myanmar (though they don’ t like it too hot there), in the Philippines and Indonesia. They don’t always use the word ‘soup’, however. What follows, for example, is a one-bowl meal to feed an entire family from a single duck. In the original, the whole duck was chopped up and boiled, bones and all,