One of Ben’s favourites, and damned good it is too. Reminds me of my fire-pot phase (or Chinese fondue as I called it).

This is an extremely flexible recipe, leaving plenty of room for improvisation. The uncontroversial fact is that, whatever you do to it, it will be extremely low in fat and high in taste. This will serve 6-8 depending on appetite.

Ingredients - serves 6-8

First make the broth:
Take 1.5 litres of light vegetable stock thickened with a couple of tablespoons of miso,add a large knob of ginger, 2 dried chillis and 3 crushed cloves of garlic, all roughly chopped.
A couple of tablespoons each of strong dark soy sauce, rice vinegar and sweet sake (mirin).Gently simmer all the ingredients for approximately an hour, sieve and discard the solids. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

For the beef:
Cut 200g of beef escalope into thin ribbons, and then marinade in a mixture of 2 tablespoons of dark soy sauce, half a teaspoon ground cinnamon, a small knob of ginger plus 2 cloves of garlic (both finely chopped), 1 tablespoon each of dark brown sugar and chilli sauce. Leave the beef in the marinade in the fridge for at least half an hour.

For the soup:
To finish the soup you will also need a packet of noodles, broken up into manageable pieces,and a selection (approx 300g) of crisp vegetables and herbs (pak choi, calabrese florets, spring onions, spinach, coriander etc) all torn into bite size

Method

Assembling the soup is a question of working out how long each ingredient will take to cook in the simmering stock. The noodles and calabrese will take longest (approx 5 minutes), the beef, if thinly cut, will take approx 2 minutes and the herbs and spinach, no time at all. Therefore bring the broth to the simmer, add the noodles and calabrese, jack up the heat to bring back to the simmer, after a couple of minutes add the beef (with out most of the
marinade) and then, finally the finely chopped spring onions, herbs and leaves.

Eat immediately.