How to cook Shi Quan Da Bu Soup

Firstly, you have to get the ingredients from a traditional Chinese herbal and medicine shop and in my  case, there is two shops to choose, Chan Siew Tong and Ying Foh Tong.

These shops are among the popular three old shops which have been gathering herbs for over a hundred years, the local community needed.

These shops used manual weighing scale where a tapered calibrated rod, a plate and an iron-casted weight could measured the amount of herbs not in kilogram but in the then weight unit, Tahil.

Small drawers containing herbs could conceal one side or two sides of the walls and Chinese words describing the types of herbs are written on the drawers.

If you tell the traditional herbalist, you want the Shi Quan Da Bu herbs, you have to tell him how many chicken or duck is used to brew this soup.

The herbalist would then recommend you the portions required to brew an excellent Shi Quan Da Bu soup.

The herbs of Shi Quan Da Bu are a mixture of the followings: Codonopsis (Dang Shen), Cured Rehmannia Roots (Shu Di Huang), Chinese White Peony (Bai Shao), Tang Kuei (Dang Gui), Poria, Hoelen, Tuckahoe (Fu Ling), White Atractylodes Rhizome (Bai Zhu), Astragulus (Huang Qi), Jujube Fruit, Chinese Red Date (Hong Zao), Ligusticum Wallichi Rhizome (Chuan Xiong), Chinese Licorice Root, (Gan Cao), Cassia Bark, Cinnamon Bark (Rou Gui), and Dried Ginger.

I decided to get these herbs at a cost of Ringgit Malaysia Fifteen. Two village roaming chickens at a cost of Ringgit Malaysia Seventy-six (Ringgit Malaysia Nineteen per kilogram) are used to enrich the taste of the soup.

At boiling temperature, these ingredients are poured into the pot and brewing takes two hours on small flame.

Remove the fats and skin of the chicken so that the soup is not oily. Pour hot water to the pieces of chicken before putting them into the pot to brew for another two hours.

After two hours of slow brewing, you can enjoy your first bowl of the Vermicelli Shi Quan Da Bu as shown here.

I acquired the know-how to prepare the Shi Quan Da Bu Soup from my mother.