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 incontrovertible fact is that, whatever you do to it, it will be extremely low in fat and high in taste.

Ingredients - serves 6-8

First make the broth:
Take 1.5 litres of light vegetable stock thickened with a 2 tbsp of miso, add a large knob of ginger, 2 dried chillis and 3 crushed cloves of garlic, all roughly chopped.
2tbsp each of strong dark soya 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 tbsp of dark shoyu sauce, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, a small knob of ginger plus 2 cloves of garlic (both finely chopped), I tbsp each of dark brown sugar and chilli sauce. Leave the beef in the marinade in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

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.

Next time, experiment. Nothing is sacred and the variations are endless. I adapted this recipe from one of Nigella Lawson’s, who not surprisingly used seared sirloin steak or duck breast.