Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Mo Tod Gatheam Prik Thai - Fried Garlic Pepper Pork


This is a simple recipe, with only a few ingredients. This also isn't strictly a Thai recipe, it is more a Chinese-influenced Thai recipe, as they don't normally use cooking wine in recipes, rather they would use oyster sauce and fish sauce. Regardless, this comes out very tasty, albeit I found it a little salty; you could use the more expensive less salt version of soya sauce instead. It is important to slice the pork thinly, it cooks fairly fast then. We used a butterflied pork chop for this, but you could use any cut of good pork for this. To find cilantro roots, you have to buy cilantro at an Asian store, where they don't cut them off already. This might also seem like a lot of garlic, but, one, I like garlic, and two, it doesn't make the pork taste only like garlic.

Mo Tod Gatheam Prik Thai
500 g pork, sliced very thinly
2 whole heads garlic
8 coriander roots
1-1/2 tsp ground white pepper
1/8 cup light soya sauce
1/8 cup Chinese cooking wine
Accompaniments:
cilantro, chopped
cucumber chunks

Remove the skin from the garlic cloves. Clean and scrape the cilantro roots. Slice the pork very thinly and place in a medium bowl.

Add one of the whole garlic heads with the cilantro roots and the pepper to a mortar and pestle. Pound the garlic and cilantro roots until they are a coarse paste.

Add the garlic-cilantro root-pepper paste to the pork. Pour the soya sauce and the cooking wine over the pork. Stir the pork slices to cover well with the marinade. Allow pork to marinate for at least one hour and up to three hours covered in the refrigerator.

Add the other whole garlic head to the mortar and pound the cloves until very coarse.

Fry pork slices in a frying pan heated to medium heat, until well cooked, about 7-8 minutes. Add the smashed garlic in the last minute of frying, stirring to coat with the oil and cook.

Serve with chopped cilantro, chunks of cucumber and brown rice.

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