vegetable tofu soup

In homemade chicken broth. That is the thing that makes this impossible to fail. I could throw anything in it and the result would be good. Nearly. 

The chicken stock was already a broth because it was produced from the carcass of a chicken that soaked to saturation in  a heavily seasoned brine, which included sugar, about half a cup of ground spices, sage, rosemary, black pepper, along with a glass of wine. The chicken soaked excessively long, overnight and a full day following, basically, twenty-four hours, and that is outrageous. Although the brine diluted as time passed by the removal of liquid with the regular additions of ice. Finally, the skin of the chicken was seasoned heavily then roasted. That skin was included with the stock. The remnant pieces of meat contained salt. So there is all that in the plain chicken stock which tends to transform it into broth. But it is not enough.

* Sake. I urge you to go out and buy a bottle of sake just for cooking purposes. It makes everything better. 

* Mirin. This is a sweet sake. There are different types. I am not sure about the type that I buy. It is like a sweet syrup, but it beats a regular syrup and it beats honey for cooking. Once I bought a bottle of Mirin that wasn't so sweet. It was so awful I threw out the whole bottle. I really do not understand the world of mirin. I am not sure I am using the real deal.

* Soy sauce

* Fish sauce. This is absolutely awful if you were to taste a half a teaspoon. It's fermented anchovy in water. Used sparingly in combination, it adds a great deal of depth to nearly everything. It seems strange to add a fish sauce to chicken broth, but it does work admirably. 

The vegetables are added to the pot as if it were a stir-fry, sturdiest first, most tender last. The pan is deglazed with those ↑ liquid additions, and then the chicken stock (broth) is added. This chicken broth is an aspic, so it is like adding chicken-flavored jelly. The tofu is added. The aspic melts, then boils.

The following bullets are purely stylistic choices. There is no good reason for any of them. I am trying to show how a great soup can be whipped out on impulses. 

* You will notice two capsicums types and two alliums. 

*  It would have been reasonable to add bits of the chicken that was frozen at the time the stock was made, but I decided against it to concentrate on the tofu. I struggle with the impulse to overdo things.

* I also decided against noodles. 

* There are no mushrooms here. 

* There is no cabbage. 

* There is no egg