Ingredients:

• Some form of pork with bones
• Daikon radishes 
• Ginger
• Green onions 

Recommended ingredients:

• Chinese cooking wine (or any light wine) 
• Garlic
• Oil (any sort of neutral oil. If you use olive oil I’m going to come find you)
• Sichuan peppercorn 

Extra ingredients if you plan on making noodles:

• Noodles
• Chilli oil

Start by preparing your meat. Traditionally you would use pork short ribs cubed. But honestly any pork with bones would work. I sometimes will buy pork chops with bones and then carve out the section with the bone and save it for soup. The kind of bone will determine how long to cook it. I’ll go over that part later. 

Prep some basic ingredients. Take a cleaver and smash some garlic cloves and throw away all the paperwork. Cut a few slices of ginger. You can leave the skin on if you don’t mind, just wash well. If you decided to peel the skin, you can afford to cut larger chunks. Bonus points if you cut hash marks in the ginger. Have a few bunches of green onions ready and reserve some more for later that we will cut (don’t cut them yet, we’ll cut them right before the soup is done). 

Tip for those who have a lot of green onions: I eat a lot of green onions. So I try to conserve them when possible. One thing I like to do is cut off all the root ends and the wilted ends of the green onion and store them in a jar. The root and the wilted ends aren’t good for eating but still have a lot of flavor that’s good for soup. So for this soup I like to use my saved up green onion roots and ends that I keep stored in my fridge. Of course I’d you’re just buying green onions specifically to make this dish then feel free to just use the whole green onion. It will be discarded in the end and just used as an aromatic for the soup. 

Rinse the meat under water and let them soak in a bowl of cold water. In the meantime, start boiling a pot of water. Since this is just for precooking, there should just be a little bit of water, enough to roughly cover the meat. Once the water reaches boiling, throw in the meat. Alongside the meat, toss in the sliced ginger, Sichuan peppercorns, and some cooking wine. Then turn the heat down to low boiling. Blanch the meat until either the red is mostly gone or up to 5 minutes. Whichever one comes first. You can then discard everything except for the meat (keep the ginger if you’d like). 

With the now empty pot (or a new one), toss in your smashed garlic and a little bit of oil. Sauté the garlic a little bit, just until they become fragrant, no need to brown them. Then fill the pot with the desired amount of water for soup along with the meat. Let it come to boil and turn the heat down to the lowest setting that still allows for boiling. Add in the remaining ginger if you still have some. And if you’re not a cheapskate like me, take a few whole scallions, tie them into knots, and toss them into the pot. But if you are a cheapskate like me, using the root ends and cut up little bits, you can use a metal net strainer to hold all the onion bits without worrying about them getting all over the place. Or if you don’t mind the trouble, have some way of fishing them out in the very end or something. 

Now have that simmer for an hour and up to four. It really depends on the size of your bone cuts and how tender you want it to be. The bigger the bone, the more you would benefit by cooking it longer. Definitely do this if you have the kind of bone with lots of bone marrow. That shits delicious. You can extract more flavor from the bone that way. If the bone is tiny, you just need to make sure you cooked the meat well enough. 

While that’s cooking prepare your final ingredients. De-skin some daikon radishes and cut them into disks/half disks/quarter disks depending on how thick of a radish you bought. Note that thicker the radius, the sweeter it is. Try to go for cuts about half to a third inch thick and diameter/width no more than 2 inches. Prepare an adequate quantity of radish slices, use feeling. After you feel the meat has been cooked enough, toss in your radish slices. Bring the heat up to high until it starts boiling and then return to low again. Let this cool for another 30-45 min depending on how thick your cuts are. 

Now also prepare some thinly sliced green onions. I’m talking some fine little bits. Really nice and green crisp tiny green onion rings. Save this off to the side for garnishing. 

After your soup is done, salt to taste. Don’t add any other seasoning, you want to preserve the daikon flavor. Remove the bunches of green onion and ginger. Garlic too if you can actually manage to find all the bits. Or leave it in. I’m not the police. And there you have it. You can now serve the soup and garnish with the finely cut green onions. 

You can have this as a side with your rice and other dishes, use this as a base for noodle soup, or just drink it on it’s own. If you plan to use it as a base for noodles, cook some soup noodles in a seperate pot to the duration listed on the packaging. Drain the noodles after cooking and add to soup. Add optional chilli oil and sesame oil for extra flavoring if you’re into that sort of thing. You may need to add extra salt to compensate for all the extra substance added.