Felise Lam (6) 3E4 Dish: Chicken and bamboo shoot soup

7/1/13

The ingredients used in this soup is chicken, bamboo shoot, mushrooms and scallops. The taste of the soup was salty andalso contained the fragrance of the bamboo shoot. The texture of the chicken was soft and tender. The mushrooms were soft and juicy as it had absorbed the flavour from the soup. The soup was not clear soup as the oil from the chicken had risen to the surface. The soup was cloudy. It was served with some corriander leaves on top as a garnish. The soup tasted abit sour as the bamboo shoots had been boiled for too long and thus released an unpleasant flavour. The bamboo shoots also became very soft and lost the crunchyness. One mistake was that the bamboo shoots had been added in too early, as soon as the soup was boiling, the bamboo shoots had already been thrown in thus they lost the crunchy texture. The bamboo shoots should have been added in at the last minute to preserve to crunchiness. I added it in too early as I felt that I needed to boil the bamboo shoots for the flavour to be released into the soup, however I was wrong. Perhaps I could have added them in midway so that they would not be overboiled and turn the soup sour. If I wanted the flavour, I could add them in midway, I can thus be able to preserve its crunchiness and the soup will not have a sour taste. Instead, the soup will have a sweeter aroma of bamboo shoots which was the results I expected. Another reason for the soup turning sour could be that when the soup was already sour and I added soya sauce to it. I presume that I had added too much soya sauce instead of salt, thus it resulted in the flavour of the soup. A strength in this dish is that the chicken was boiled just right. The chicken was well cooked and it was thus tender and soft. Most of the parts of the chicken had absorbed the flavour of the soup and that was one of the expected results. Chicken broth was used to boil the chicken and the other ingredients. The broth was prepared separately by boiling chicken bones for an hour. It was then left to freeze and used to cook the chicken soup the following day. This is much healthier than the packets of broths we see in the supermarket. It is not concentrated and not so salty and it brings out the natural flavour of the chicken. The chicken however, did not taste sour as compared to the mushrooms and the taste of the soup. The mushrooms absorbed a lot of the soup and thus, did taste abit sour. As for presenting, I found out that I had too little soup to cover all my ingredients. I also added too much bamboo shoots into each bowl which blocked

out the other ingredients. There were much lesser mushrooms presented. I wanted to put more bamboo shoots as I felt that the bamboo was one of the more important ingredients, but I overlooked the fact that it was too much. The bamboo shoots would also broken easily and that was another weakness. This dish did not turn out to be as good as I expected to be and it was most probably caused by overcooking the ingredients, thus I now know that different ingredients should be added in at different timings to ensure that none of them are overcooked and undercooked. Such small areas that I have to take note of will make a very big difference in how my soup will turn out.