Recipe：Cantonese dessert---Papaya Tremella fuciformis sweet soup 木瓜炖雪耳

My mum's little papaya tree harvested 4 large papaya recently. we gave some to friends and left one for me. but the papaya is too big too eat it in one time, so I have to think about use it to make some dessert. today I made Papaya Tremella Fuciformis sweet soup.  

Ingredients:  serves 4 people 

Papaya  some,  diced 
Tremella Fuciformis   1/2 bloom
Sugar    1/4 cup of cube sugar 
                1/2 piece of jaggery sugar     if you cannot found these sugar, you can use white sugar

few slices of ginger               

all ingredients can be found in supper market, both Chinese and Thai supper market. 



how to choose Tremella Fuciformis:
avoid to buy those are extremely white. the one showed on the first picture is the good quality one. my friend brought from Taiwan.   

You can found the left one are much whiter than those on the right. It is might be treat by  sulphur dioxide. it is really difficult to buy non sulphur dioxide  treated tremella fuciformis in China, (food security has been a problem~). so I suggest to sock the  tremella fuciformis  and leave it over night. I allergic with sulphur dioxide, so I have to make sure it was erased before cook.  

sock it over night, and you will see their volume has enlarged a lot.

wash them again then put into the slow cooker along with the diced papaya. 

add some water in about 1L, when choose the mode of making soup. 

for those use fire stoves: strong fire cook until boiled, then turn into small fire and keep cooking for about 30 mins .

cube sugar

jaggery sugar

add sugar in and raise the temperature and cook the soup until the sugar was melted.  

serve in hot. or 

put it into fridge after the soup to cool down to room temperature. 

 most of people will use cube sugar, but I would like to add half jaggery sugar.

why? different sugar actually taste slightly different, you can do some experiment, and try to found out what fit your favour.  But I think this combination tasted better. 

 tremella fuciformis is quite equivalent to bird nest,  both of them full of collagen, which is good to skin and lung!!!!  while its price is just 1/10 of bird nest. 

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