Hot And Sour In One Soup

Best hot-and-sour soup: Hunan

Restaurant, 9164 Rainier Ave. S.,

Seattle. 725-2223.

About halfway through the search for this area's best hot-and-sour soup, I developed one wish and one theory.

The wish was that at the remaining restaurants I would visit, the hot-and-sour would be the so-called soup of the day. That way, when eating alone, I could order only a cup - and not be faced with one of those large bowls made to serve six to eight people sitting around a big table with a Lazy Susan in the middle.

As to the theory, it grew out of the wish: I began to think that the best hot-and-sour soups were the ones where one person really couldn't finish an entire bowl. Not comfortably, anyway. Too much hot, too much sour, too much tofu and egg and bamboo shoots and mushrooms and pork for one willing, even eager, stomach.

But the soup at Hunan Restaurant in the Rainier Valley, to my great and sweaty pleasure, erased the wish and disproved the theory.

One might think the distinction of having the area's best hot-and-sour soup would change, from time to time. It is, after all, on the menus at most of the 70-odd Chinese restaurants listed in the Seattle telephone book alone. And it is, in the West, one of the best-known and most-requested Chinese dishes. But almost from the day Chung Kuo Young opened the Hunan (not to be confused with the Hunan Dynasty on Lake City Way or the Hunan Garden in Bellevue or the Hunan

Harbor on Lake Union), his hot-and-sour soup has been at the top.

Challengers? Possibly (one should always be wary of definitive statements). But two things have happened ever since I was led to the Hunan in 1984 by a John Hinterberger review: 1) Despite full intentions to try other items on the menu there, I've ordered at least that soup every time there - I just couldn't bear to miss that experience, nor could I imagine anything tasting better. 2) The Hunan's version has become the standard by which to measure all others, over the past six years and more intensively over the past several months.

The secret at the Hunan, it

Hunan's secret is in the oil

seems, is in the hot. The sour - vinegar - is relatively easy. But the hot, well, that's another story. Most cookbooks on the subject say that either dried red chili peppers, hot (spiced) oil, or finely ground white or black pepper are the source of the hot in hot-and-sour soups. Some argue vehemently for one and discount the authenticity of soups made with the others. Some use a combination.

At restaurants, the hot-and-sour soups spiced primarily with hot oil are easy to spot, with pools of reddish oil floating on top. Copious

flecks of red give away when chili-pepper flakes are the main heat-producing ingredient.

But at the Hunan, the flavor seems more complex and at the same time more rounded. The hot sneaks up on you, yet stays well past the initial hit, and lingers only in memory by the time the next course comes around.

One recent weekday, Young slipped out of his very busy kitchen for a few minutes just before the midday rush (some 150 people seated before 11:45). At lunchtime, the kitchen makes a large pot of hot-and-sour soup in order to speed service to customers on short lunch breaks. But at dinner, he said, it's prepared one order at a time.

Young estimated that 90 percent (no, that's not a typo) of his customers order this soup (in three sizes: $4.50, $6.95 and $9.95). Clearly veterans of the hot-and-sour experience, they can be seen removing jackets and sweaters in anticipation of the soup yet to be served.

The key to his hot-and-sour soup, Young said, is the special oil made fresh in his kitchen. A mixture of vegetable and sesame oils is infused with five ingredients: black pepper, dried red pepper, green onion, ginger and - the surprising one - star anise.

These five, Young said, ``they have a very special experience'' as they mingle in the oil, a process that takes 30 to 40 minutes. The resulting flavor he described as ``very soft.'' If you use only pepper or chilies, he explained, the flavor is too strong, sometimes so strong it makes you cough.

When tasting his soup, Young said, ``we want to eat more and more, but it's very comfortable.''

Young brought the recipe with him when he came to this area in 1979. But it originated in his family's kitchen in a small town south of Beijing. He left China in 1948, when he was 13, also leaving behind one special aspect of the authentic hot-and-sour soup.

In the West, hot-and-sours usually contain a type of mushroom called ``tree ears,'' or, less poetically, ``tree fungus.'' The dry, dark mushrooms are soaked in warm water until well-expanded and then are sliced thin to simulate the appearance of the ingredient Young said is common in traditional Chinese hot-and-sour soups: coagulated chicken's blood.

``Over here, we can't do that,'' Young said. ``People here don't like chicken's blood.''

On that, too, Mr. Young may be right on target.

Runners-up:

Atlas, 424 Maynard Ave. S., Seattle. 623-0913.

New Peking, 7845 Lake City Way NE, Seattle. 523-1010.

Sea Garden, 509 7th Ave. S., Seattle. 623-2100.