Soups & stews
Chinese crab and sweetcorn soup
A simple, fresh soup, nothing like the gloopy stuff you sometimes get from takeaways. Buy crab meat from your local fishmonger – fresh will taste best, but frozen is ok. If you can't get hold of any use shredded chicken instead.
Ingredients
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 tbsp fresh ginger, finely chopped or grated
- 1 garlic clove, crushed
- 2 spring onions, finely sliced
- 3 sweetcorn cobs
- 1 litre chicken or vegetable stock
- 1 tsp cornflour, mixed with a little cold water
- 200g white crab meat
- 1 tbsp dry sherry
- 1 tsp sesame oil
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
- 1 handful coriander leaves, roughly chopped
- salt and pepper
Method
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Step 1
Heat the vegetable oil and fry the ginger, garlic and half the spring onion until just cooked.
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Step 2
Cut the corn kernels from the cobs and purée half of them in a blender or processor.
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Step 3
Bring the stock to the boil. Add a ladleful of hot stock to the cornflour paste, mix well, and return to the pan, stirring well.
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Step 4
As soon as the cornflour-stock mixture returns to the boil it will thicken. Add the purée, the sweetcorn kernels, the crab, sherry, sesame oil and the fried ginger, garlic and spring onion and simmer for 4-5 minutes.
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Step 5
Pour the beaten egg through a fine sieve to form threads and cook for another minute. Just before serving, add the red chilli, the remaining spring onion and the coriander. Add a little soy sauce to taste.
