Like it or hate it, the Chinese mutton soup had never been a mainstream hawker dish as many people do not appreciate the gamey taste and smell of mutton. Sadly mutton has a bad rep for being gamey, greasy and what the Chinese called ‘heaty’. Image Source The Dead Cockroach
But cook it well with the right herbs & technique, mutton soup can be invigorating, nourishing and absolutely heavenly, making it the perfect dish to have on a cold rainy day. Many of the younger generation term it an “uncle" (middle aged male) dish, supposedly to reinvigorate the libido in men.
There’s generally two Chinese versions of mutton soup. The Hainanese style mutton soup is a thicker herbal soup made with mutton, various types of herbs including ginger, gan cau, dang shen, bei qi, yu zhu, cinnamon, dang gui, chuan xiong, star anise, cloves and wolfberries. Added to this brew are Sichuan pepper seed, dried wood ear fungus, red dates and various beancurd derivatives like beancurd sheets, beancurd puffs and fermented bean paste. Traditionally, goat meat is used to make this dish on Hainan island as goats were traditionally slaughtered only for special events like weddings & the soup was served only during such festive occasions.
A Teochew-style variant of the Hainanese mutton soup emerged in 1962, attributed to Ng Seok Jua, who began selling the soup at a stall along Beach Road. The Teochew version has a clearer soup with lighter flavour. It also contains just mutton meat and various mutton parts in it. This dish is slowly disappearing from the Singapore hawker scene and it is hard to find a good mutton soup stall these days.
So whenever I am in the Changi Village Hawker Center, I make a beeline for this stall Hougang Jiang Jia Mutton Soup. Prepared after hours of boiling, the soup here has a defined light herbal taste and captures the flavour essence of the mutton. Most of the fats are cut off before cooking, so the soup comes across rather ‘clean-tasting’ and not too oily or rich. What’s interesting for me is this stall sells a whole range of mutton parts ranging from meat, ribs, meatballs, tendon, tripe to even the more exotic part like brains, penis & testicles.
The mixed bowl I ordered for takeaway consisted of mutton meat, meatballs, ribs, tripe and tendon. The soup was lightly flavoured with a mild herbal taste. Amidst the mild flavours, you can still enjoy the gamey taste of mutton. The mutton meat was tender, slipping off the bone when I picked it up. The soft meat were infused with the soup. I like it that the meat though soft still had a bite to it. The tendons were boiled till it was soft like a gelatinous jelly, barely holding together, and so ‘shiok’ in the mouth (And no, I did not order the exotic parts.)
A most satisfying takeaway meal indeed !!!
