Korean Cooking: Soft Tofu Soup

One of my most favorite Korean stews is soft tofu soup. I love LOVE LOVE spicy foods so I enjoy making all my food super spicy but if you don't like spicy food, just take out some of the spicy ingredients.

If you are not fond of any of the ingredients that I use, you can always substitute the ingredients for anything you want.


Ingredients:

• Hot Pepper paste*
• Red Pepper flakes*
• Garlic*
• Onions*
• Clams
• Pork
• Soft Tofu
• Seaweed*
• Soy Sauce*

The ingredients with the stars are ingredients that are essential! Anything else, you can substitute with anything else you like.

 1. Cook the clams! Put the clams in boiling water for about 20 minutes.

 2. Drain the clams from the boiling pot but don't throw the water you used to boil the clams away. We will be using this water to make the soup base for the tofu stew.

3. Make the soup base! Add the seaweed and a couple garlics into the broth. In the picture, my mom uses a special pouch to keep all her soup base ingredients together but you don't need it. Just add the ingredients into the boiling pot! Leave the pot boiling for about 20 minutes. The longer the better, but 20 minutes is just enough. So while we wait for the soup broth, lets work on the other ingredients.

4. Dice the pork into small pieces.  

5. Dice your onions and pumpkins into small bite size pieces. 

 6. Make the sauce for the soup. Mix about two table spoons of hot pepper paste, a table spoon of soy sauce, a table spoon of pepper flakes, and diced garlic together.

 7. Put the sauce into a pot with a little bit of oil. This is just to cook the diced garlic before adding the other ingredients. 

 8. Add the pork first and grill until the pork is fully cooked. Beef is okay to eat a little raw but pork is not so make sure you cook your pork entirely!

 9. Add your vegetables and continue to grill the ingredients together until the pumpkin is slightly squishy.

10. Add your soup base you made earlier into the pot. Keep the heat on high because you need to bring up this stew to a high boil later. 

 11. Like stated before, bring up your stew to a high boil. Just when the soup is boiling, add your soft tofu.

 12. After a couple minutes, add your clams that you cooked earlier.

 13. Bring your soup to one last boil! 

FINISHED! Serve and eat! A lot of people also enjoy cracking a raw egg into the soup right before serving it! I don't really like it so I didn't do it but if you want to go for it!