I missed this post back in April.
If I get what I think you were referring to, that hominy is actually prickly water lily, or 芡實, i.e. the stuff in the middle below. Cantonese likes to throw some into their soups. Do you still remember its texture? It takes quite a long time to completely soften if the dried ones are added directly to the water at the beginning of the cooking process. So its texture can give you some idea how long the soup has been cooking, unless its soaked ahead of time.
If I go strictly by quality, Best Taste’s double boiled soup wasn’t particularly great. But considering its merely the price of a soda, and its actually time-consuming cooked food, then its a very good deal. Same for Imperial Soup. Your $10 set lunch with a tureen of double boiled soup is an amazing value. Its hard to find either the bamboo rib rice or the soup by themselves elsewhere in the Bay Area for $10, let alone both for $10. Some relatively cheap food like a bowl of pho is also like $10. Fast food plus soda is also like $10. Imperial Soup are food that takes some labor to cook. Can’t believe there are only 15 people eating while you were there.
The medicinal properties vary dependent on the ingredients. Many of these are traditional Chinese herbal ingredients that are meant to steer your health subtly in one direction just like Chinese medicine in general, rather designed to suddenly produce dramatic results, like Western medicine. With that said, too much of certain ingredients in the unskilled hand can yield some unexpected results. The trick is the balance.
Better Cantonese soups don’t need to be salty. In fact, they aren’t particularly strong in any particular flavor. All the ingredients work together to produce a tranquil, harmonic soup like a tender breeze gently making love to a curtain. Too often, the Cantonese restaurants in the Bay Area add too much salt to the soup. And once you get home you end up drinking water for 3 hours straight and pee all night long.
That, is really what much of the Cantonese soups in the Bay Area is missing- the subtle and nuanced balance. Go to Koi and get a bowl of double boiled soup, and its still a bowl of salt.
