Cooling and Calming Chrysanthemum and Roselle (Hibiscus) Honey Tea

Cooling and Calming Chrysanthemum and Roselle (Hibiscus) Honey Tea

Cooling and Calming Chrysanthemum and Roselle (Hibiscus) Honey Tea

Tea Name:

Chrysanthemum and Roselle (Hibiscus) Honey Tea

Traditional Chinese Name:

菊花茶 (jú huā chá)

This tea is sweet and sour to taste and cooling in nature.

Visit us on YouTube for more tea and soup videos.

Taking a moment?  Want something calming and soothing?  Try this sweet and sour chrysanthemum and roselle honey tea! 

I love the sweet tart flavour of this tea and the calming benefits it brings.  This tea is perfect for hot summer days, cooling the body if you’re feeling too heaty, and calming the spirit and mind.

It’s a yin enhancing tea, so if you’re feeling too heaty, unsettled, or too dry, you can take this to relieve the excess heat and also moisten your lungs and stomach.  

What’s involved?

Prep time: 2 mins

Cook time: 5 mins

Total time: 7 mins

Serves: 2 cups of tea

Ingredients

Cooking Instructions

  1. Add all the dried flowers together with the 2 cups of water and boil in a stove top safe tea pot (either glass or ceramic) on medium heat for 5 minutes or until the tea begins to colour a beautiful dark pink (this is the the hibiscus flower color coming out into the tea)
  2. Set aside for a few minutes to allow the tea to cool before adding honey (as heat will destroy the nutritional properties of honey)
  3. You can add boiling water 2-3 times before the flavours run out (which is why I love these dried flowers)

Benefits

  • This tea is cooling and helps relieve heat in the body (excess yang or yin deficiency)
  • It helps calm and soothe the body and mind
  • Hibiscus is actually a hang over tea!
  • These ingredients store comfortably in room temperature for months.  Just be sure they are in dry conditions.
  • Both these dried flowers are very affordable and are commonly found in supermarkets, herbal shops, and even western herb shops
  • Honey is a neutral ingredient that is calming, relieves pain, and detoxifies the body.  Be sure to let the tea temperature drop a bit as honey loses its beneficial properties in hot temperatures.

  • Roselle, also known as hibiscus, is a calming and cooling herb that actually aids in coughs and hangovers!  It’s got slightly sour tones, so compliments nicely with honey.

Precautions

  • These are cooling ingredients, so if you’ve got yang deficiency, I would add a slice of ginger to balance it out
  • Generally, Chinese medicines are boiled in ceramic or glass pots (and not steel or metal pots), this is so that the ingredients don’t react with the metal.  I like using a stove top safe glass like this one.  

EQUIPMENT USED

To answer your questions on what equipment I'm using, I've built a section here where you can find and explore what I'm using to make soups.  Ingredients are a little harder, but I will do my best as I source them around.  However, you can always message me on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook, and I will reply and try to point you in some direction!  

A great help for fish or small bones in soups, including small ingredients such as barley, fox nuts, spices just to keep everything together.

A MUST HAVE in the kitchen!  Energy saving, cost effective, and perfect for busy chefs!  Check out my article here that explains it.

Another MUST HAVE in the kitchen for soups!  It's so fine that it will scoop off the top oil and foam layer when using meats in your soup!

I use these types of stove top safe tea pots to make most of my herbal teas!

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White Radish with Mushrooms and Vermicelli in Chicken Soup

White Radish with Mushrooms and Vermicelli in Chicken Soup

White Radish with Mushrooms and Vermicelli in Chicken Soup

Soup Name:

White radish with mushrooms and vermicelli in Chicken Soup

Chinese Name:

白蘿蔔冬菇粉絲雞湯 (bái luóbo dōng gū fěn sī jī tāng)

 

For more videos, visit us on YouTube.

Sometimes, I want something relatively easy and quick to whip up all in one-pot!  Make a bit of rice or noodles on the side and serve up this dish as a meal for your family.

This soup has got a healthy selection of protein and packs a volume of vegetables.  You can design the vegetable of your choice, and my family loves to eat siu choy (or napa cabbage), but normal cabbage, lettuce, also go well.

You can also be selective in your mushrooms.  I kind of just went with a whole bunch of fresh mushrooms from the supermarket such as fresh oyster, brown, and shiitake mushrooms.  Dried mushrooms also work well, but do need more time to rehydrate.   

What’s involved?

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 30 mins

Total time: 45 mins

Serves: 6 bowls

Ingredients
  • 3 chicken thighs
  • 1 whole white radish, peeled, cubed
  • mushroom selection (your choice, I went with fresh oyster mushrooms, fresh brown mushrooms, and fresh shiitake mushrooms)
  • 3 dried shiitake mushrooms (for flavour)
  • 1 pack of dried vermicelli
  • 2 small napa cabbage (or vegetable of choice) – something with a lighter taste (so the whiter / paler the vegetable is better)
  • 1 tablespoon of dried conpoys
  • 1 tablespoon of dried longans
  • 1 tablespoon of white miso paste
  • 3-4 L of water

 

Cooking Instructions
  1. Soak the vermicelli in cool water for at least 10 minutes
  2. Chop chicken into large pieces and in a shallow pan fry skin down (no oil as needed as a lot of the fat will be rendered out).  Fry on medium heat for 5-7 minutes, flipping as it browns.  The chicken doesn’t need to be thoroughly cooked as it will be going into the soup anyways, you just want the edges to be a nice golden brown with a crust.
  3. Boil your soup water.
  4. Peel and chop white radish into cubes.  Size is up to you depending on how much time you have.  The less time, the smaller the pieces should be.
  5. When the soup water boils, throw in the pan-fried chicken thighs and white radish and boil on high for 10 minutes
  6. You can drop in the dried mushrooms, conpoys, and dragon eyes (in this case, I don’t rehydrate the mushrooms as they need a good hour sometimes, so dropping them in directly is OK)
  7. Cut up your napa cabbage in small pieces and drop into your soup, along with your selection of mushrooms
  8. Continue to boil for 10 minutes on medium heat
  9. Drop in 1 tablespoon of white miso and stir it around to make sure it’s dissolved.
  10. Finally drop in the hydrated vermicelli and boil for another 10 minutes on medium heat, covered.
  11. Top with chopped green onions or cilantro for taste.
  12. Serve and enjoy!  You can add rice or noodles as part of the meal.

Some time saving tips!

  • You can pre-soak the vermicelli first thing in the morning.  This stuff stays pretty supple throughout the day and will only soften when boiled.  If you’re going to soak them, I’d suggest to also soak the dried shiitake mushrooms, too!
  • The quicker you want your soup to cook, especially the white radish, cut the pieces smaller.  I like larger pieces because you can fish them out, but smaller will help if you’ve got a time crunch!
  • You can replace the miso paste with a soy sauce soup base (with chicken broth) as well.  I don’t use any broth powder in this case as miso is perfect on it’s own!
  • Tofu is also a great quick cook ingredient to add if you want more variety.  All types of tofu!
  • Don’t be afraid to cook the chicken on HIGH heat.  Just make sure you monitor it and turn and rotate the chicken as it browns.  Remember, you don’t need to fully cook it, you just want enough of a beautiful crust and brown so it’s crispy and already bursting with flavours!

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Homemade Do-it-yourself Wontons in a “Cheat” Chicken Broth

Homemade Do-it-yourself Wontons in a “Cheat” Chicken Broth

Homemade Do-it-yourself Wontons in a “Cheat” Chicken Broth

Did you know that wontons literally means “cloud swallow” in Cantonese?  These little delights are like clouds and bite-sized enough to be swallowed in one gulp!

For more videos, visit us on YouTube.

Check out the video on how to create awesome wontons at home!  

What I’ve done here is used a “cheat”  chicken broth where I’m using a chicken stock as a base, but flavoring it a bit more with some additional ingredients.  A great use of veggie scraps sometimes in these cases.

And one of a Chinese Soup Chef’s best friend, the soup bag is used here.  I highly recommend getting a few at home.  Be sure to wash and boil first before usage.  Since they are made of cotton, you can throw them in the wash as well or wash by hand.  They keep EVERYTHING in, including onion skins, seeds, flower petals, fish bones, the works.  Instead of straining, just use one of these which you can just drop into your soup and voila!  easy to remove ingredients.

What’s involved?

Prep time: 45 mins

Cook time (broth): 30 mins

Cook time (wontons): 10 mins

Total time: 1 hour 30 mins

Makes: 50 wontons

Equipment needed:

Ingredients (for cheat chicken broth):

  • 500 mL of chicken broth

  • 1 L of cold water
  • 1-2 pieces of star anise
  • 5 dried scallops
  • 5 dried longans
  • 1 whole garlic
  • 1 whole fresh onion
  • 3 shallots
  • 1 leek

Ingredients (for wontons):

  • 500g of ground chicken

  • 6-7 fresh shrimp, deveined and diced

  • 20 bunches of fresh chives, diced

  • 3 bunches of fresh green onions, diced

  • 1 tablespoon diced garlic

  • 1 teaspoon of fish sauce

  • 1 tablespoon of oyster sauce

  • 1 tablespoon of soy sauce

  • 1 teaspoon of white pepper

  • 1 teaspoon of cooking wine

  • sesame oil to taste

  • 50 wonton skins

Cooking Instructions

  1. Begin to boil your chicken broth in your soup pot
  2. Chop up the soup “cheat”  ingredients and put them all into the soup bag
  3. Add directly to your chicken broth and boil on medium heat for 30 minutes
  4. For the wontons, mix in ground chicken, diced shrimp and all the seasoning together
  5. Chop up the chives and fresh green onions and add them in
  6. Mix well together until the meat creates strands (it should be pretty sticky)
  7. Put a small amount of meat into the middle of your wonton and using your finger, wet all around the edges and fold as you’d like (there are so many techniques out there, I just like to squish it at the top to form a little package)
  8. Wrap them all as to ensure the wonton skins don’t dry out
  9. Remove the soup bag from your soup, ensuring there’s nothing remaining in the soup
  10. Add in 10-15 wontons.  This should bring the soup down from a boil.  
  11. Once the soup begins to boil, add in 200mL of water to reduce the temperature.  This will keep the wontons whole and not boiled and destroyed in the voracity of the boil.  Do this 2 additional times meaning, when it boils again, add 100mL of water.  I know this will dilute the soup somewhat, so you can also do this in a separate pot of water or add more chicken broth.
  12. Once it begins to boil the 3rd time around.  Strain out, scoop some soup, garnish and serve!

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