Vegetable Hot-and-Sour Soup
In 2018, Food & Wine named this recipe one of our 40 best:Food & Wine often covered (and tried to debunk) diet trends, with columns on everything from avoiding carbohydrates in the 1970s to embracing healthy fats in the 2010s. In a regular column on low-fat cooking, chef and author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo shared her recipes for Chinese food and how to avoid hidden fat in marinades, sauces, and soups. Her Vegetable Hot-and-Sour Soup offers extraordinary depth of flavor from ginger, soy sauce, and sesame oil and layers of texture from lily buds, mushrooms, and bamboo shoots—you won’t miss the meat. Dried lily buds, also called tiger lily buds or golden needles, are nutritious and slightly sweet. In Chinese dishes, they are often used with the dried fungi known as tree ear, or wood ear, mushrooms. Although both add layers of chewy texture to this dish, they can be omitted.
