A festive Teochew sweet broth uniting five auspicious ingredients—dried longan, ginkgo nut, lotus seed, job's tears, and lily bulb—in a clear rock-sugar syrup. The name 五果 (five treasures) signals abundance and good fortune, anchoring Teochew lunar celebrations, wedding banquets, and birthday feasts.
Five-ingredient auspicious sweet broths have deep roots in Teochew and broader southern Chinese festive cooking. Each of the five components carries dual symbolic and medicinal weight in the Teochew culinary vocabulary: longan for the heart, ginkgo for the lungs, lotus seed for the mind, coix for the spleen, lily bulb for calming the spirit. While no single classical text definitively records this exact five-fold formula, the combination appears consistently across Teochew food records and community recipe archives as a canonical banquet sweet, with its logic traceable to Ming-Qing-era customs of using drug-food dual-purpose ingredients in communal festive soups.
The broth is gentle and faintly sweet with five distinct textures contrasting in every spoonful: yielding lotus seeds, plump chewy longan flesh, firm coix grains, creamy lily petal pieces, and ginkgo nuts that are soft outside with a slight bitter pop at the center.
Each ingredient contributes distinct functional compounds. Coix (job's tears) contains coixenolide and is classified mildly cold in TCM, valued for draining dampness from the spleen and stomach. Lily bulbs are starch-dense; their colchicine glycosides exert a mild calming effect consistent with the traditional lung-calming attribution. Ginkgo nuts contain trace hydrocyanic acid and toxic 4-O-methylpyridoxine; thorough cooking degrades both to safe levels—hence the mandatory blanching step. Lotus seeds' high resistant-starch content explains why they maintain a firm-yet-yielding bite even after extended simmering. Rock sugar's lower mineral content compared to raw cane sugar keeps the broth pale and clean-tasting.
Variations
Some families add a strip of dried tangerine peel for fragrance; wealthier households may substitute coconut water for plain water as the broth base. Summer versions are served chilled over ice. The specific five ingredients are not immutable—coix is sometimes replaced by pearl barley, lily bulb by tremella mushroom—but the count of five, with its auspicious symbolism, remains constant.
On the Palate
Where Five-Treasure Sweet Broth sits in the Chinese flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 4
How it's made
6 steps · 1 hour
- 160 min
Soak lotus seeds and coix in cold water for 1 hour (lotus seeds ideally overnight). Separate lily bulb into individual scales. Shell ginkgo nuts, blanch in boiling water for 2 minutes, then peel off the thin inner skin. Remove pits from dried longan.
Watch outBlanch the shelled ginkgo nuts and peel off the inner skin — raw ginkgo carries trace toxins, and thorough cooking is what makes them safe.
- 220 min
Bring 1.5 liters of water to a boil in a pot. Add the soaked coix and simmer over medium-low heat for 20 minutes.
- 320 min
Add the drained lotus seeds and continue simmering for 20 minutes.
- 410 min
Add the longan and ginkgo nuts. Simmer for 10 minutes.
- 55 min
Add lily bulb scales and rock sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar and simmer for 5 more minutes until lily is tender.
Watch outAdd the lily bulb and rock sugar only at the end — lily turns mushy and falls apart if it simmers the whole time.
- 65 min
Taste and adjust sweetness. Serve warm in bowls, or cool and refrigerate for a chilled summer version.
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