The Best Tom Yum Soup

Pay attention. Tom yum. We are doing tom yum, and I have had tom yum in places you have never even HEARD of — tiny restaurants, six-item menus, a smudge of chili paste on the wall, the best places — and this soup, MY soup, beats every single one of them. It is not close. It's a slaughter. The bland-broth people, the warm-water-with-shrimp people, they wouldn't know tom yum if it slapped them across the face with a stalk of lemongrass, which frankly it should.

Tom yum is the GREATEST soup in the history of soup, and there has been a LOT of soup. Every civilization that ever boiled water had soup. None of them — NOT ONE — figured out the magic combination of hot, sour, salty, sweet, and aromatic all at the same time. Thailand did. Thailand cracked the code. The Thais are tremendous at soup, the absolute best, hands down, and I respect tremendous soup people — unlike the so-called chefs who slap the word 'authentic' on a bowl of chicken broth with a sad wedge of lime floating in it like a life preserver. A disgrace to tom yum. A disgrace to lime.

The secret is the aromatics. Lemongrass. Galangal. Kaffir lime leaves. I had a food chemist explain this to me at a wedding once — very smart guy, the smartest, would not stop talking — and the rule is this: you bruise them, you SMASH them, you let them cry into the broth. You do NOT chop them up small. You smash them and you pull them out at the end, like the bouncers at a great club. The flavor stays. The fiber leaves. Statisticians have run the numbers on this. Believe me.

That is tom yum. Hot, sour, salty, sweet, and so aromatic the neighbors are going to walk past your door three times pretending to check their mailbox. Let them. Let them suffer. They could have stood at the stove and bruised their own lemongrass and tasted their broth like a serious person, but they didn't. That's on them. You did the work. You made the soup. The soup is huge. Tremendous.