See the full gallery on posterousEver since I came across Burnt Lumpia's (www.burntlumpia.typepad.com) modified recipe of his grandmother's Chicken Sotanghon I've wanted to try my hand cooking the soup at home. Chicken sotanghon has mythic significance for me. It is one of a handful of menu items that I looked forward to indulging in at recess in elementary school in La Paz, Iloilo. The minute I read Marvin's blog on sotanghon, all the gustatory memories rushed back. I wanted to have chicken sotanghon again!
I had a tin of achuete or annato seeds from Dean and DeLuca of all places. Marvin's recipe called for extracting the color from annato seeds but adding ancho pepper and bay leaf to the concoction. I don't think we added anything to the oil when using achuete in Iloilo. I heated the oil and threw in a tablespoonful of annato seeds. Nothing. No characteristic brick-red color bleeding into the oil. Natch!
I started all over. First I soaked three small skeins of dry sotanghon (mung bean threads). I heated some cannola oil in the pot and sautéed minced garlic, and sliced white onions and Roma tomatoes. When the tomato was soft, its insides spilling into the oil, I added slivers of poached chicken thighs and slightly browned those. I poured in 3 cups of homemade chicken stock and when the stock was simmering added the bean threads. When the sotanghon was tender and most of the soup soaked up, I spooned the lot into a bowl, added more boiling chicken stock, white pepper and chopped scallions. Voila! Chicken sotanghon even simpler than Marvin's "lazy" recipe.
In my recipe, it's the sautéed tomato that gave the yellow-red color to the soup. Achuete might add a different flavor to the soup and I mean to try using them as soon as I get some fresh ones from Asia Mart in Castleton. For now, my urgent craving for sotanghon is assuaged. In fact now I am craving a sotanghon salad bathed in sesame oil that I love at Sichuan, the Szechuan restaurant in Carmel.
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