Goji, longan, red dates, lemongrass, pandan — the herbs in the brew, explained

Read the ingredient line on a bottle of Beyond Collagen+ and it is short: deep-sea fish-scale collagen, water, goji, longan, lemongrass, pandan, red dates, and — in the sugar edition only — honey rock sugar. That is the whole recipe. No flavour compound, no "natural flavouring" doing the work five real ingredients could do instead. Here is what each one actually is, and why it earned a place in the pot.

Why these five, and not a longer list

Every home recipe for 鱼鳞冻 we looked at, from Cantonese kitchens to Malaysian ones, leans on some version of the same short list — a couple of sweet, tonic dried fruits and a fistful of fresh aromatics to fight the fish smell. Nobody adds fifteen ingredients to a fish-scale broth; a longer list would mostly be masking a lesser-quality brew, not improving a good one. Three of ours are the sweet tonic trio Chinese cooking reaches for constantly, in soups and teas as much as in this jelly. Two are Southeast Asian aromatics doing a specific, unglamorous job: taking the fishiness out.

枸杞 · Goji berries

The small, wrinkled red berries you can see loose in the photo above. Dried goji — wolfberry — is one of the most common sights in a Chinese kitchen: a handful goes into 老火汤 (long-simmered soups), into tea, into congee, into almost anything meant to be gentle and nourishing rather than rich. It brings a faint, tart-sweet edge and a small amount of natural colour, and in Chinese food tradition it is one of the ingredients most closely associated with 滋补 — a mild, everyday tonic food, the kind you would add to a pot for someone you were looking after. That is a statement about its traditional place at the table, not a claim about what our jelly does for you; we say more about where that line sits further down.

龙眼 · Dried longan

The small brown fruit in the photo, shown both in its papery shell and shelled down to the dark, almost date-like flesh inside. Dried longan — sometimes called "dragon eye" for the pale scar left where the seed sat — tastes like concentrated brown sugar with a faint smokiness from the drying process, and it is the ingredient that gives the brew most of its natural sweetness before any sugar is added. In Chinese food theory it is a warming ingredient, traditionally paired with red dates in 桂圆红枣茶 (longan-and-red-date tea) — again, a description of its long-standing role in the wider food culture, not a promise about this bottle.

红枣 · Red dates

Chinese red dates (jujube), the deep-red fruit also visible loose in the photo. They are one of the most ordinary ingredients in Chinese cooking — into soups, into tea, into a lunchbox as a snack — valued for a sweetness that does not need refining, and for how easily it is accepted by almost anyone, unlike some stronger tonic herbs. Alongside longan, it is the other half of that everyday warming pairing. Practically, it is also doing real work in the bottle: the natural sweetness from longan and red dates is why the no-sugar edition still tastes like something, rather than plain fish broth.

香茅 · Lemongrass

The pale, woody stalks bundled on the right of the photo. Lemongrass is not part of the old Chinese tonic tradition at all — it is a Southeast Asian kitchen staple, the same stalk that goes into a pot of Malaysian laksa or Thai tom yum, bruised or sliced to release a sharp, citrus-and-ginger aroma. In this brew it earns its place doing a specific job: fish scales, simmered on their own, smell exactly like what they are, and lemongrass is one of the most effective things a Southeast Asian kitchen reaches for to cut that smell without masking it with something sweet or artificial. It is the aromatic half of 去腥 — the fishiness-removal step every home cook fusses over when they make this dish themselves.

香兰叶 · Pandan leaf

The long green blades behind the jar. Pandan is sometimes called the vanilla of Southeast Asia — it shows up in Malay and Nyonya kitchens the way vanilla shows up in Western baking, its grassy, faintly floral, slightly toasted-rice aroma running through everything from kaya to pulut to a simple pot of rice. Like lemongrass, its job here is aromatic and practical as much as traditional: it rounds off the citrus edge of the lemongrass and gives the finished brew a smell that is unmistakably Southeast Asian rather than generically "herbal". Pairing a Chinese tonic trio with Malay aromatics is not an accident — it is the same blending Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese kitchens have done for generations, in this dish as in many others.

What this list is not

It is worth being direct about the difference between two things this article has mentioned: a food's traditional place in Chinese kitchen wisdom, and a claim about what a bottle of Beyond Collagen+ will do for you. Goji, longan and red dates carry centuries of use as gentle tonic foods — that is a fact about food culture, not a result we are promising. We will not tell you this jelly targets your eyesight, your blood, or anything else these ingredients are traditionally associated with, because collagen you drink does not travel anywhere you aim it, and neither does a berry. What we can say plainly: these are five real, whole ingredients, in the amounts a home cook would actually use, doing the two jobs a good broth needs — a little natural sweetness, and a smell you would want to drink.

The collagen itself is the other half of the story — what it is, and what it can and cannot do, is covered honestly in what fish-scale collagen jelly actually is. If you want to see the full ingredient list and the two doses of the same brew, they are on the product pages: The Everyday (7,500mg) and The Flagship (15,000mg), or the ingredients section on the homepage.