lotus root

Lotus Peanut and Pork Ribs Soup

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Lotus Peanut and Pork Ribs Soup

I have always wanted to make this soup, but have until now been unable to do so for one reason or another. This was largely due to the fact that I was always forgetting to buy that one crucial ingredient – peanuts.

Now that I have gotten over that hurdle. I can finally make this Lotus Peanut and Pork Ribs Soup. Actually I believe I have made this soup once before but the peanuts didn’t cook as well as I would have liked. But that could also be because I was boiling the soup as opposed to cooking it in a 12 hour thermal cooking process. Also, I didn’t pre-soak the peanuts as most tradition home cooks would advise.

So I did it my way, and to be honest, the experts are right. You really need to pre-soak the peanuts overnight. Oh well, at least I managed to get a rather soft peanut, but not soft enough. Plus I kept it in the thermal cooker for more than 12 hours. Didn’t know peanuts are so resilient.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 long tube Lotus Root (they say the lotus root should be covered in mud, otherwise not so good quality)
A bowl of Peanuts (better to pre-soak overnight, I tried not soaking and failed, so please soak)
1-2 pieces of Dried Octopus
250 grams of Pork Ribs
Salt

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water. Place frozen pork ribs into pot. Throw the pre-soaked peanuts into the pot. Throw the dried octopus into the pot also. Wash the lotus root, shave off the skin, then slice the tubular root into beautiful shapes. After that throw into the pot. Add a pinch of salt to taste. Add boiling hot water. Boil for 20 minutes. After that, place in thermal cooker for 12 hours and let the magic happen.

Bon Appetit!

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Sliced Lotus Root

Lotus Root Drink (sweet)

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Lotus Root Drink (sweet)

My wife taught me this recipe one day and I thought it to be one of the best recipes ever. I love drinking lotus root soup but I never heard of a sweetened version of this delicious root. It’s really simple to prepare. The recipe is so simple that you would be shock to learn it.

In her words, “just dump the lotus root in water, boil and add sugar.”

For the sake of our puritan traditionalist readers, I will make the recipe a little more complicated so that it looks and sound legit. I understand how you guys think.

So to make it easy (or complicated) for you guys, I managed to find an awesome YouTube video on how to boil this delicious Lotus Root drink. The only problem is, there is no such recipe online for a sweetened version of the Lotus Root!

I fired up YouTube and searched the following keywords “sweet lotus root drink recipe” and it yielded a whole slew of salty versions of the Lotus Root Soup with other condiments. I thought, perfect right? Since I needed to make this recipe complicated. So here goes, just for you guys..

Cool right?!

I think the above video on how to prepare Lotus Root Soup totally rocks.

Now how does that video relate with what I am trying to teach my readers. Well it is simple, let me teach you how to use the video to achieve what I want to share with you. Firstly disregard everything that the video tells you to prepare and only remember the Lotus Root. Slice it like the way the person do it. That’s the most important part. Everything else that the person does in the video you can disregard since my wife’s recipe doesn’t require them.

Now imagine there are pandan leaves in the video. You can replace the carrots with images of pandan leaves. If you can’t imagine, just google “pandan leaves” – then take a long hard look at the leaves and quickly switch over to the video and imagine the carrots to look like the pandan leaves. I tried it, and it works.

So my little addition to the recipe is to add pandan leaves into the lotus root drink and basically that’s it!

Where I shop?

The best place for Lotus Root is really the wet market where you can find the freshest of groceries in the entire housing estate. The softer alternative is to go get it at the supermarket. I often choose NTUC because it is the nearest to my place. So you can choose whichever resource you like, as long as you get the right item. Then probably a few baskets away, you will also find the pandan leaves. Easy.

 

Recipe

Ingredients

A few tubes of Lotus Roots

1 bunch of Pandan Leaves

Rock Sugar

 

Method:

1. Wash the mud off the Lotus Root, scrub the root and then shave off the skin of the root. Then slice it into half a centimetre slices.

2. Put the sliced Lotus Roots into a pot of water and turn on to high heat. Add the pandan leaves in knotted bunches into the pot. Boil until you smell the fragrance of the pandan leaves. Taste test the broth, and see if you are able to taste the faint flavour of the Lotus Root. If so, it should taste like Lotus Root.

3. Add the rock sugar. This is when the magic happens. Sweetened it until it is almost just right sweetness. If just right sweetness is 100%, then you should sweeten it until it is about 80% sweetness.

4. Taste test the Lotus Root Broth now, and you will experience hints of Sugar Cane and Water Chestnuts as well. Interesting right? I knew you would love this recipe.

Bon Appetit!