A traditional Chinese soup that is served in most Chinese restaurants (at least in Hong Kong) and this relatively difficult soup will bring you great pride if you actually execute! I say this because for starters, cleaning and preparing pork lung is not an easy task.  Secondly, preparing the almonds is not an easy task because this recipe calls for almond juice.  However, because of all the grunt hours and sweat you've put into making this, the enjoyment is that much more worth it.  Trust me!  So here I give you a soup that many of our readers have requested.  Good luck and let me know how yours turns out!

This soup exists at the intersection of Chinese herbalism and Chinese dessert culture — and that is exactly what makes it special. The almond juice technique comes from the tradition of Chinese sweet almond dessert soups (杏仁糊, xìng rén hú), which have been served at Cantonese dessert shops for generations. The genius of this recipe is bringing that dessert technique — grinding almonds with rice, straining, adding to hot liquid — into a savoury Lung-nourishing soup context.

The result looks like something between a cream soup and a tonic broth. The white colour that the almond juice creates is not just aesthetic — it signals to anyone who grew up with Cantonese food that this is a Lung soup, a moistening soup, a soup made for dryness and cough and the kind of internal aridity that autumn and winter bring.

The pork lung underneath all that pale almond beauty is doing the most direct work — the like-nourishes-like principle at the heart of this recipe. But the almond juice is what makes people remember it, request it, and understand immediately what it is for.

This soup is often served WITHOUT the ingredients and just as the pale, white soup! It really is delicious though!

This soup was made for you if you:

• Have a dry, persistent cough without phlegm — this is the primary and most specific indication
• Want the most visually distinctive and texturally luxurious Lung soup in the repertoire
• Have Lung Yin deficiency signs — dry throat, dry skin, internal dryness, mild internal heat
• Are in autumn or winter when Lung dryness is at its seasonal peak
• Want a soup that functions as both medicine and something genuinely beautiful to serve

🤍 Almond Juice — The Signature White Colour and Lung Nourisher To make the almond juice: wash the rice and almonds, add to a blender with 2 cups of water and blend until smooth. With a fine strainer or sieve, separate the almond juice from the blended grains. Add the strained almond juice to the soup in the final 10 minutes and boil on high for another 10 minutes. This step is what makes this soup unique in the entire repertoire — no other soup uses this technique, and the result is completely distinctive. Raw almonds in TCM nourish Lung Yin, moisten dryness, and generate fluids. Combined with rice — which tonifies the Spleen and Stomach — they produce a juice that is both delicious and deeply nourishing for the Lung.