Chicken and Sweetcorn Soup
Creamed sweetcorn for the body and a cornflour slurry for the texture, with the egg poured in a thin stream while the soup is barely moving.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 20 min
- Total
- 35 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Celery
- Cereals containing gluten
- Eggs
- Soya
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Chicken
Soup
To finish
Method
Chicken
Toss the diced chicken with the Shaoxing wine, the teaspoon of cornflour and the salt, and leave it for 10 minutes.
That cornflour coating is velveting, the standard Chinese technique for keeping lean meat tender. It forms a thin barrier that stops the surface of the chicken seizing in hot liquid, and it is why takeaway chicken is softer than the chicken most people poach at home.
Soup
Bring the stock and the ginger slices to a simmer.
Add the chicken, stirring to separate the pieces, and poach for 3 minutes until opaque.
Add the creamed sweetcorn, the kernels, the soy sauce and the sesame oil, and simmer for 5 minutes.
Creamed sweetcorn is doing the body of the soup and is not the same as blended kernels — it is milled and cooked with the starch left in, and it is what makes this taste like the takeaway version.
Stir the cornflour slurry to recombine it and pour it into the simmering soup, stirring constantly.
Cook for 2 minutes until it thickens and turns from cloudy to glossy.
To finish
Turn the heat right down so the soup is barely moving.
Pour the beaten egg in a thin steady stream from about 30cm above the pan, while stirring slowly in one direction.
The height and the thin stream are what make the ribbons. Tipped in from a bowl at the surface, the egg sets in one lump; poured slowly into moving liquid it sets in threads.
Take it off the heat immediately, fish out the ginger, and stir in the white pepper. Serve with spring onions on top.
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What to expect
- Taste
Sweet first, from a great deal of corn, then savoury from the stock and soy, with white pepper giving a distinct hot-earthy note at the back that black pepper does not.
- Aroma
Sesame oil and ginger, both added late so they survive.
- Texture
Thick and slightly slippery from the cornflour, with the pop of the kernels and the soft threads of egg. Silky is the word for it and is what the technique is for.
- Sound
None.
- How the flavour moves
Sweetness first, savoury second, then white pepper at the end. Short and comforting.
- Serve it
Hot, and it holds heat unusually well because of the starch.
- Goes with
Prawn crackers. Anything else on a takeaway menu.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner, with one piece of technique worth practising.
- Cost
Low.
- Equipment
A pan and a jug for the egg.
- When to make it
A weeknight, or when someone is ill.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
The slurry turns the soup from cloudy to glossy, which is the signal it has cooked out. The egg should form visible ribbons rather than clouds or lumps.
- And it feels like
Thick enough to coat a spoon and to hold the corn in suspension rather than letting it sink.
- Food safety
Chicken poached in simmering stock for three minutes at 1cm dice is cooked through; check a piece if unsure. The egg is cooked by the residual heat of the soup, which is above 70C throughout, so it is not a raw-egg dish.
- Where it goes wrong
- Pouring the egg into boiling soup, which shatters it into fragments.
- Tipping it in from a bowl at the surface, which makes one lump.
- Skipping the velveting, which gives firm rubbery chicken.
- Blended sweetcorn instead of creamed, which is not the same product.
- Adding the slurry without stirring it first — cornflour settles solid in minutes.
- Black pepper instead of white, which tastes wrong here.
- If it does go wrong
Egg in lumps: the soup was too still or the pour too fast. Egg in fragments: it was boiling. Thin: another tablespoon of cornflour slaked in cold water. Gloopy: too much cornflour; loosen with stock. Bland: soy and white pepper, in that order.
- Making it ahead
Poorly. Make the base ahead and add the egg on reheating.
- Keeping it
Two days in the fridge.
- Reheating
Gently. The cornflour thickening loosens slightly on reheating and the egg toughens a little.
- Freezing
Not recommended — cornflour-thickened soups go watery on thawing and the egg goes rubbery.
- Leftovers
Eat it the next day; it does not improve but it holds.
- Scaling it
Doubles cleanly.
- Substitutions
Dry sherry for Shaoxing wine. Vegetable stock and no chicken for a vegetarian version, which still needs the egg. Frozen kernels are fine and often better than tinned.
- Dietary swaps
Contains eggs, soya and gluten — soy sauce contains wheat, which surprises people, and tamari is the gluten-free alternative. Celery and sulphites come from shop stock. Dairy free and nut free.
- Shopping for it
Creamed sweetcorn is usually near the tinned vegetables. Shaoxing wine from a Chinese grocer, where it costs a fraction of the supermarket price.
- Keeping the cost down
Cheap. A tin of creamed corn costs very little and is doing most of the work.
- Sustainability
Chicken is the lowest-footprint common meat, and 250g feeds four here — the corn and the stock are doing the bulk. The vegetarian version with vegetable stock and no chicken is genuinely good rather than a compromise, since the texture comes from the corn and the egg. Tinned and frozen sweetcorn both have low footprints and no seasonal constraint.
- Nutrition
Low in fat, decent protein, and a lot of sweetcorn.
- Worth it?
Take the pan off the boil and pour from a height. Ten seconds of care and it looks like the takeaway.
Where it comes from
- Origin
China; this version belongs to the overseas Chinese restaurant.
- Also called
Sù mǐ gēng — sweetcorn thick soup.
- Said out loud
soo mee gung.
- What the name means
Gēng means a thick, starch-thickened soup, a category distinct from a clear broth.
- History
Sweetcorn arrived in China from the Americas in the sixteenth century and was widely taken up. The soup belongs to the gēng family — soups deliberately thickened with starch, which is an old and distinct Chinese category rather than a Western influence. Its ubiquity on British and American menus comes from the wave of Cantonese emigration and the takeaway trade of the mid-twentieth century, and the crab version is the more prestigious relative.
- Why it matters
One of the most-ordered starters on British Chinese menus, and for many people the first Chinese dish they ever ate.
- When it is eaten
A starter, a light lunch, or something to eat when unwell.
- The traditional way
Two: velveting the meat in starch, and the egg-drop, both of which are standard Chinese techniques with wide application.
- How it changed
Very little in transit, which is unusual among takeaway dishes.
- Regional variations
Crab and sweetcorn is the same soup with crab. Egg drop soup is the same technique without the corn.
- How this version differs
Nothing unorthodox. Both techniques are explained rather than instructed, because both are transferable to other dishes and neither is obvious.
- Sources and credit
None.
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