Favorite Recipe from My Book - Grandma's Pork & Veg Stew

Sawasdee ka, welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen. So I just came back from visiting my family in Thailand and my 98-year-old grandmother, believe it or not, is still cooking. So I came back super inspired to share with you one of her signature dishes. This one is called Jap Chai and it happens to be one of my absolute favorite recipes in this book, Sabai, and also one of the most underrated. Jap Chai is the epitome of comfort food. It is grandma's warm hug in food form. One of those dishes that make you go, ah, when you take that first sip. And you cannot get it at any restaurants, okay? So the only way you can experience it is for you to make it at home, but luckily it is very easy. So what is Jap Chai? Essentially, it is a pork and vegetable stew. Jap means 10 and chai means vegetables in Teochew Chinese, which are the people who brought this dish to Thailand. But don't worry, you do not need 10 vegetables to make a 10-vegetable stew. It's only called that because this is a dish people make when they're trying to use up bits and bobs of vegetables they've got lying around. So it just kind of ends up being a medley of vegetables by default. So it's a practical, rich, clean-out recipe that always tastes amazing. So let's get started with our ingredient prep. For protein, we need pork ribs cut into small pieces like this, and you can get them already cut at most Chinese butchers. Sometimes they come in a long piece like this, so you just have to cut between the bones to make individual pieces. I do prefer back ribs for this as the pieces are more even and easier to work with, but spare ribs will also work just fine. If you find a piece that's got a particularly chunky piece of meat attached to it compared to other pieces, you might wanna trim that down so they all cook at the same rate. If all you can find is a full rack of ribs, that's fine. You can still cut them into pieces and use them. They're just a little unwieldy in a stew, and the cut ones do give out more flavor as there is more surface area. Now, let's meet the six veggies I'm gonna use for our 10-veggie stew. I've got daikon, peeled and cut, dried shiitake mushrooms, which I've rinsed to remove any dirt, carrots, cabbage, Chinese broccoli, and garlic, if that counts as a vegetable. I'll talk about other vegetable options in a bit, but for now, let's get cooking. All right, this is the easiest recipe in the world. It's like a dump everything into a pot kind of recipe. So I'm gonna first start by sautéing our... Pfft! By screwing our oil onto our bottles properly. I got just the right amount of oil. We're just gonna go with it. You have some oil in the pot, you're gonna turn it on, and sauté our garlic and some white pepper. This can be black pepper, until it is aromatic. What serendipity that the exact amount of oil I need is the exact amount of oil that was in that bottle. Now, I'm sautéing the garlic, but on my laziest of days, I will actually skip this step, as you can just throw everything raw into the soup and let it simmer. So if you're just trying to get this thing going, you just wanna clean out your fridge, you have my permission to do that. But if you take the time to sauté the garlic, it will taste a little bit better. Okay, my smallest bits of garlic is golden now. You wanna go in with the ribs, and just stir the garlic so it's off the bottom of the pot, so it doesn't burn. And then, in with our water. Oh my God, I think I picked a pot that is too small for this recipe. I may have to change later. In addition to this, I'm going to add our long cooking vegetables, which are the dry shiitake mushrooms, which will hydrate and flavor the broth all in one fell swoop. And also the daikon, which will make the broth naturally sweet. At this stage, if you've got any vegetables that basically will not overcook, like any kind of mushrooms, you can add them at the initial stage. So now, before we let the pork simmer, we wanna add the seasoning so the pork has some flavor to absorb while it's cooking. So I'm gonna go in with some soy sauce, some oyster sauce, which I will use this teeny tiny spatula that a fan gave me in Singapore to scrape off everything, and some Golden Mountain sauce. You can use Maggi seasoning, or you can just do more soy sauce. And for some color, a little bit of black soy sauce or dark soy sauce for that richer flavor as well. Give this a stir, bring it to a simmer, and then let it simmer for about 30 to 40 minutes until your pork is pork tender. So this will vary depending on the size of the pieces of your pork that you're using, but 30 to 40 minutes should be fine if you are using ribs. While that's going, let's talk substitutions. So if you don't eat pork, you can use chicken drumettes for this recipe. So drumettes are sort of the equivalent of pork ribs. It's sort of like that meat that does well in soup, but has a lot of bones. So the bones will give a lot of flavor to the broth. You don't wanna go all boneless meat for this because the bones is what gives the broth a lot of flavor and body. Now, secondly, some people also like to add pork belly in addition to ribs. In my family, we always just do ribs, but in a lot of other families, if they like it a little bit more fatty, they can do pork belly. You can do that as well. In addition to the ribs, not like as a substitution, and you will have to extend your cooking time a little bit because pork belly tends to take longer than ribs to cook. I've never seen it done with beef in Thailand, like ever, but if you wanna give that a go and you wanna use like beef bones and oxtail or whatever, feel free to try it. Finally, vegetables. As I said, it's a fridge clean-out recipe, so feel free to put in whatever, but make sure it's the kind of vegetables that hold up well in soups. So aside from the ones that we used today, you can also do celery, napa cabbage, you can do tofu, any kind of mushrooms will work. But the two vegetables that I don't suggest you skip is daikon and dry shiitake mushrooms because those really add a lot of good flavor to the soup. And I will link to other vegetable suggestions in the blog post. Mm, it smells so good now. The pork has finished simmering, so they are pork tender. The pork is pork tender now, which you can simply test by poking it through with a fork. And if the fork goes through with no resistance, then it's ready to go. If you want, you can skim the scum. To be honest, I really most of the time don't care, but if it just looks like too much fat or cruts or whatever, it depends also on the cut of meat that you use. If your meat has a lot of fat, you might collect a lot of fat. If it doesn't, then it will be pretty clean. And don't worry about skimming bits of garlic out because the garlic by now, after 30, 40 minutes of simmering, have given off most of their flavor into the soup. The other thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to take the mushrooms out because now they're fully hydrated and I'm going to slice them so we can eat them comfortably. And as I take them, I'm gonna use tongs to squeeze excess water and leave them here for now so they can cool. So while that's cooling, we're gonna add our other vegetables, our carrots. And I like to add carrots, not something my grandma adds, but I like to add carrots because it adds color to an otherwise very brown soup. So hers never looks particularly, you know, appetizing, but it always tastes really good. But adding carrots just make a world of difference. Cabbage, for me, in japchae is a must. You just have to have it, otherwise it's not complete. And some Chinese broccoli, which if you don't have, you can also do broccolini. Broccolini would work quite well. I just, I don't think broccoli would work as well. I don't know. I've never had it. The idea of it's just weird to me. Cruciferous vegetables generally will work quite well here. So get them submerged. So that's gonna take about 10 minutes for the carrots to soften. Meanwhile, let's slice our mushrooms. So slice off the stem because the stem can be, slice it this way would be safer, can be a little tough. And then with the cap, you just slice into slices. So there you go. Okay. And then this just all goes back into the soup. Push it all inside. Give it a mix. So the pork comes to the top. Wow, look at that. Don't worry, it won't look this good when we're done with it because all the greens will turn a little bit brown, but for now it looks very good. This dish is not known for being pretty, just to set the expectations correctly. It's had 10 minutes. The vegetables are now cooked. And now it is the most important thing and that is to taste whenever you cook anything that has simmered for a long time, you absolutely have to taste because you don't know how much water has evaporated. So your seasoning has got to be confirmed. So good. It's almost perfect, but I will add a little bit more soy sauce. I can definitely add a little more salt. Also, if I'm happy with like the flavor profile, this and it just needs a little additional saltiness. The soup has zero sugar added, but all the pork, the daikon, and the vegetables have given natural sweetness. I don't need a lick of sugar for here, but a little bit more soy sauce and that should do it. The other thing is, this is a soup that I will eat with rice. So that has to be taken into consideration when you season, if you're going to just eat a bowl of this by itself, which you totally can. Then the seasoning doesn't have to be quite as strong. Perfect, perfect. All right, let me show you how to eat it. In a Thai meal, if you have Jap Chai, you're gonna have to serve yourself a little bowl of it. Make sure you get everything. And then typically, the meal would also have rice. Now, you do not have to pour the soup onto the rice, but you can if you want to, but most likely you're gonna have the rice and some other things so you can have that and then take a break and then have the Jap Chai on its own. Always start with a sip of the broth because that is going to wash down everything else you've just eaten and it's just so comforting. And if you're wondering, well, how do you tackle ribs, bone-in ribs in a soup, there's no graceful way of doing it. So you're basically gonna put it in your mouth, chew off the meat and spit out the bones, okay? But it's a lot easier than it sounds. Okay, you just bite off the bones. No, bite off the meat. And if you cooked it well, it should be so tender. Just comes right off. And when you're done with the bones, you can just put it on the plate beside your rice. It is totally acceptable to do that. This is such an amazing dish. I mean, yes, you can see it's comforting just by looking at it, but what you can't get by just looking at it is how flavorful it actually is by just simple ingredients, but the pork bones, the daikon, the shiitake mushrooms, all that just adds so much umami. And this just packs so much flavor, but not aggressive flavors like some Thai dishes can be. It's just simple, homey flavors, a little salty, a little sweet, and umami, and you can have this every day and you won't get tired of it. So I really, really hope you give it a try. As I said, you will not find this in any Thai restaurant. This is strictly home cooking. If you wanna experience what Thai people eat in their homes, this is one of them. The recipe, as always, will be on hotthaikitchen.com along with all the extra tips and tricks or any questions you might have, definitely check out the recipe post first. A special thanks to all of our Patreon members who help support the show, and thank you, as always, for watching, and I will see you next time. Sawadee ka.