This vegan hot and sour soup is tangy, spicy, and savory, with mushrooms, silken tofu, bamboo shoots, and a flavorful broth thickened with blended shirataki noodles. It’s also officially the recipe that used up the last packet of shirataki noodles in my pantry, with just 10 days to go before I had to move apartments! It had been many, many years since I’d eaten hot and sour soup, and, to be honest, I couldn’t quite remember what it was supposed to taste like. I browsed a number of recipes before making this one and found a surprising amount of variation, from recipes made with fairly everyday ingredients to others containing things I’d never heard of. So, while this is very much my own low-carb interpretation rather than an attempt at anything authentic, I used that familiar combination of sourness, heat, and savory flavor as my starting point.

Apart from the shiitake and wood ear mushrooms and bamboo shoots, which are actually readily available at my supermarket, I built the soup largely around ingredients I already had on hand. Rice vinegar provides the sourness, while sambal oelek, ginger-garlic paste, and white pepper bring the heat. Most of the recipes I looked at started with broth, but the tamari, miso, and other seasonings here already contribute plenty of salt, so I use water along with nutritional yeast and onion powder to build up the savory flavor without pushing the sodium even higher. The shirataki noodles are blended directly into the broth rather than left whole, giving it a little more body without the starch traditionally used to thicken hot and sour soup. If you have low-sodium tamari or soy sauce, you could try vegetable broth in place of the water, although it’s worth checking the carb content of packaged broths and bouillon as well.

I use a mixture of shiitake and wood ear mushrooms, but you can substitute whatever mushrooms you like, and hearts of palm can replace the bamboo shoots. I’ve also provided nutrition information for the broth on its own so you can make more substantial changes to the additions if you want to. In fact, this is a pretty adaptable soup, so feel free to adjust the vinegar, chili paste, pepper, type of mushrooms, vegetables, and other additions to suit your tastes. If you happen to have another packet of konjac noodles hanging around, you can find more ways to put them to use in my shirataki noodle recipes.