Bok Choy with Chinese Ham in Pork Broth

One of the best smelling Chinese soups I have ever made.  It is deliciously sweet and extremely beneficial to the lungs with it’s perfect combination of Chinese herbs that target to moisturize, heal, cleanse the lungs.  The dried bok choy and preserved Chinese ham are a great and common Cantonese combination for soups.

This soup is more heavy on the Chinese herbs side.  A majority of the herbs listed below target the lungs primarily, clearing heat from it, and dispersing phlegm and fluids from the body (mulberry root, codonopsis root, and the luo han guo).  This soup is great if you’ve got a wet cough, feeling heavy in the chest with a lot of congestion (in the nose, too!), and feeling heaty in the body (very scratchy and swollen tongue).  This is a sign of excess yang (or yin deficiency).   

Ingredients

• 1 pound of fresh pork shank

• 3 large carrots

• 2 fresh corn

• 50 g of dried bok choy

• 100 g of Chinese preserved ham

• 1/8 of a luo han guo

• 1 piece of dried tangerine peel

• 1 tablespoon of apricot kernals

• 20 g of rice beans

• 4 honey dates

• 1 Codonopsis Pilosula Root (5 g)

• 3 g of wind weed rhizome

• 3 g of root bark of White Mulberry

• 3 L of water

Cooking Instructions

1. Blanch fresh pork shank in a pot of boiling water
2. Boil your soup water
3. Prepare carrots and corn by cutting into edible pieces
4. Rinse well in warm water the dried bok choy and all of the additives (other ingredients)
5. When water boils, add all the ingredients together
6. Boil on high for 30 minutes and reduce to simmering for another 1.5 hours