City famous for one thing - lamb soup 简阳羊肉汤

Jianyang is a city that is 50 km SE of Chengdu and is now partitioned into the city of Chengdu. The city is known throughout the region for one specialty - lamp soup. It is rare that a city is known so well gastronomically for one thing. I can think of NYC pizza, Chicago deep dish pizza, Busan Gukbap (pork soup) or Okinawa pork. It takes a lot of dedication for an entire city to be known for one thing. It suddenly went form 31 degrees celsius to 8 degrees in one day and we decided to warm ourselves up with some hot lamb soup.

Geographically, Chengdu is a plain surrounded by mountain ranges. This is why it was selected as the capital for many chinese governments and it is the bread-basket for the entire region. We drove past the Chengdu city limits and pass by gentle rolling hills to get to the city of Jian Yang ( 简阳)

Once you reach the city, you immediately start noticing shops everywhere selling lamb soup ( 羊肉汤）For one street, for a span of 300 meters, there are 6 lamb soup shops. Quite the competition, so in order to survive, the shops must all taste decent. We arrived at a particular shop, this one is recommended to me by a Jianyang city local. At the entrance of the shop, you can tell that this place sells lamb. There are also fresh leeks, which is used in the soup as well.

The sign says “Jianyang lamb soup - cosmetic for women and viagra for men” The lamb soup sounds pretty amazing.

This place does not look fancy and is relatively clean. All the utensils are individually wrapped wrapped. There isn’t a menu and we just ordered a jin ( 500g) of lamb meat and a jin of lamb offals. It is all served in a soup with rice and house pickles. The pickle is fermented cabbage with a bit of spiciness and acidity, nice to balance out the richness of the soup. Usually restaurants in Sichuan all make their pickles in house and judging from the quality of pickles, you can know the calibre of the chef. This pickle is just okay, but the highlight is in the lamb soup.

The chef mentioned that usual soups are made with lamb bones and tilapia. The tilapia is a easy way to reach the umami in the soup. For this shop, only lamb bones are used and boiled for over 8 hours. Usually some spices and leeks are also added to rid the smell. Firstly, the meat and bones are separated and soaked in cold water for an hour to get rid of all the blood. Then the process is repeated until the water is clear. This is to make sure that the soup does not have the strong smell of lamb. Then, lots of medium sized tilapia fish is fried and then cooked with high heat until the soup turns milky, and then the lamb bones are added with leeks to cook for a few hours until the soup looks like milk. The lamb meat itself is placed in the soup to cook only up to 70% done, then removed and placed aside.

Before serving, the meat and offal is first stir fried in a wok. The white chunk on the bottom left is lamb fat. The lamb fat is melted and then heated up to smoking, then the meat and offal is quickly stir fried until fragrant and then added to a hot bowl of soup. The resulting soup has the clean broth taste as well as the fragrance from the maillard reaction of the stir fry.

Meat is first stir fried in the lamb fat

Main boiler to stew lamb bones, milky soup

Optionally, you can add cilantro, fresh chili and green onions to the soup. Pieces of meat are picked out and then dipped in a dry powder mix of ground chili, ground peanuts and salt. One can drink the broth and enjoy it with some rice. Very satisfying dinner on a cold day. The city of Jianyang may be harder to get to for those visiting Chengdu, i will hunt out some decent soup places in Chengdu soon.

Address: 成都市简阳市红建路45号

Phone: 028-23181135;13118059568

Hours: 09:00-21:00