This soup or tea is completely designed for the dry, cold, dry, cold, super dry, or super cold winter conditions. It’s a vegetarian (meatless) moisturizing tea suitable for the whole family and tastes super yummy.

You can consider adding fresh snow pears or fresh apples to sweeten it further, just take caution with the amount of rock sugar you add. It’s a combination of the all the ingredients that help being moisture to the lungs, body, skin and internal organs. You can drink this to your heart’s delight!

Do note that snow pears are mildly cool ingredients, so not recommended if you’re in confinement or need to avoid cooling ingredients.

Ingredients

• 2 dried snow fungus, soaked and cut into quarters (removing the center, see video below)
• 4 pieces of dried snow pear
• 20 g of apricot kernals
• 1 pieces of dried tangerine peel
• 2-3 large dried dates
• 20 g of dried lily bulbs
• 1-inch diameter wide rock sugar (or brown sugar)
• 1 L of water

Cooking Instructions

1. Soak the dried snow fungus in warm water until it is completely covered. Let it sit for about 15 minutes until it has become soft and large. Using a pair of scissors, cut it quarters while removing the hard yellow middle.
2. In a separate bowl, soak in warm water the dried tangerine peel for 5 minutes.
3. Once the tangerine peel softens, using the face of a knife, scrape off the darker side of the peel (this is the bitter part) just slightly.
4. Start to boil your tea water
5. When the water boils, add all the dried snow pear, apricot kernals, tangerine peel, dried dates, dried lily bulbs together.
6. Boil on medium heat for 1 hour.
7. In the last 5 minutes, drop in the rock sugar and mix.
8. Serve and enjoy! Ideal to drink hot in the winter time!

The ingredients are pretty common in Hong Kong or your local Asian supermarket.  And you can buy them in bulk and store them in a dry, sealed container for many months – or in the fridge for even longer.

Preparing the Snow Fungus (video)

For snow fungus, you’ll need to soak them in warm water for some time – pretty much until they explode into giant balls.  Normally, people don’t eat the hard middles, but you can still cut it out and put it in with the soup. The tricky thing with snow fungus is that it dissolves into the soup. This means, the soup gets thicker and stickier the longer you boil it with snow fungus (scientifically speaking is that the viscosity of the liquid increases). You can remove the snow fungus halfway through if you don’t like it so thick.

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