Monday 7 May 2007

Quintessential Vietnamese food


Thit kho tau -( which literally means pork belly braised in Chinese style) or a more common name in Viet restaurants is pork braised in coconut juice.
This is one of the most popular Vietnamese dish, which is served with white rice and sometimes picked bean sprouts. The meat is marinated and refrigerated for 8 hours ahead of the cooking time, then braised and simmered in a pan of coconut juice for at least 2 hours until all the flavour has incorporated into the meat and the hard boiled egg.
It is a lengthy cooking process but it's totally worth it when you chew into the soft and tender pork pieces which are both sweet (from the use of sweet soy sauce or caramel sauce) and savoury (from fish sauce). Eaten with pickled bean sprouts or picked Chinese mustard leaves as side dishes, it is one of my top ten all time favourite food.
Recipe will be dug up some time later if requested.

4 comments:

simcooks said...

I saw this from another blog (WanderingChopsticks dot blogspot dot com) before. But she calls it "Thit Heo".

Hedgehog said...

yeah, i was lazy with my language :D thit means meat in general and it's more precise to call it thit heo which means pork

Wandering Chopsticks said...

Haha. Simcooks is pimping me out. :) You don't have to marinate the meat for so long. As long as you let it simmer for several hours, it'll still be fall-off-the-bone tender. And if you have a cast iron pan, which retains heat better, it'll make it tender faster.

Hedgehog said...

unfortunately i dont have a cast iron pan so I just have to make do with what I've got. :D Thanks for the advice, I'll do it your way next time