Keep the lid on from start to finish, or leave it off entirely. Lift it midway and the beany smell gets trapped inside.
2 servings20 min
Remove the heads and guts from the anchovies and toast them in a dry pan for 1–2 minutes. It cuts the fishy smell.
Add them to 1 L of water and, once it boils, simmer 10 minutes, then strain them out.
Rinse the sprouts. Do not remove the heads — the protein and fat are there.
Add the sprouts to the stock and put the lid on.
Do not lift the lid until it boils. Then cook 3–4 minutes more.
Add the minced garlic and soy sauce and cook 1 minute more.
Just before turning off the heat, add the sliced spring onion and chilli, and adjust with salt.
The lid rule is the whole soup.
Soybeans contain lipoxygenase, an enzyme that, when cells break and meet oxygen, degrades fats into the compounds responsible for that beany smell. Heat inactivates it.
Whether that has been tested in cooking experiments, this site could not confirm. But the mechanism is coherent, it does no harm, and it is widely used.
Do not remove the heads. Most of the sprouts' protein (13.1 g/100 g) and fat sit in the head, the cotyledon. People pull them off to avoid the beany taste and discard a large share of the nutrition.
Three or four minutes is enough. The vitamin C (15.3 mg/100 g) is heat-sensitive and water-soluble. A long boil loses it and the crisp texture with it. Though drinking the broth recovers what leached out.
Toasting the anchovies dry is about the fishy note, which is largely volatile and leaves with heat. Heads and guts come off because of bitterness.
An honest word on the hangover claim.
The reason usually given for this soup is aspartic acid. But this site found no randomised trial in people where feeding soybean sprouts changed a hangover measure.
There are still reasons this soup helps the morning after — they just belong to the broth, not the sprouts.
Dried pollack soup and seaweed soup do the same job. And the only reliable way to sober up is time.
If you count sodium, the tablespoon of soy sauce and the salt are almost all of it. Drink the whole bowl of broth and you take all of it in.
Vegetables
Nutrition data"Aspartic acid cures a hangover" is a widespread belief, but this site found no randomised trial in people where feeding soybean sprouts changed a hangover measure. The 172 µg of folate, 15.3 mg of vitamin C and 13.1 g of protein are real.
Vegetables
Moderate evidenceThe evidence for garlic points to a modest drop in blood pressure and cholesterol. The trick is to crush it and wait ten minutes before it hits the heat.
Seafood
Strong evidence1.45 g of EPA and DHA per 100 g. A cohort links small-fish intake to lower mortality — but only in women.
Herbs & spices
Moderate evidenceAcross 564,748 adults in four countries, regular spicy food eaters had 12 % lower all-cause mortality — with almost no disagreement between studies.