INGREDIENTS
Soft pork bones
500 g pork soft bones
125 ml (½ cup) mirin
1 piece kombu
125 ml (½ cup) Chinese cooking wine
1 tsp salt flakes
1 litre (4 cups) water, or more to cover
Paste
1 tsp salt flakes
2 cm piece young galangal (10 g),
finely chopped
2 coriander roots, cleaned and finely
chopped
6 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
½ tsp white peppercorns
2 small red chillies, roughly chopped
Seasoning sauce
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp fish sauce
2 tbsp coconut nectar or palm sugar
2 tbsp rice vinegar
Stir-fry
4 shallots, sliced lengthwise
2 cups holy basil leaves
Steamed jasmine rice
Miele accessories
METHOD
Soft pork bones
1. Place the ingredients into a deep unperforated steam container. Cover with the water.
2. Place into the steam oven and Steam at 100°C for 3-5 hours, or until the bones are tender.
3. Once cooked, separate the stock from the meat and cut into 1 cm slices. Thinly slice the kombu.
4. Place the stock in the fridge to separate the fat. Once the fat is solidified, spoon in a separate container or jar, this will be used to stir-fry the dish later.
Paste
1. Using a mortar and pestle, pound all the ingredients until they are the texture of a rough paste.
Seasoning sauce
1. Whisk all the ingredients together.
Stir-fry
1. Place the wok on the cooktop and heat on medium heat, induction setting 4 for 5 minutes. Increase the heat to high, induction setting 9 for 2 minutes.
2. Add ¼ cup of the reserved fat to the wok, then put the paste into the fat and with the wok spatula use a flattening and scraping motion to move and cook the paste.
3. Once it starts to caramelise and cook out, add the shallots into the wok and mix that around until it starts to soften, when this has happened, add the soft bones and kombu and move the ingredients around the wok gently without breaking the meat chunks.
4. Pour the seasoning around the wok sides, making sure you keep scraping around the outside with the spatula so the rim edges don’t start to burn.
5. Once the seasoning is well absorbed into the meat and the dish is not overly saucy, turn the heat off completely and add the holy basil. With a gentle flipping motion of the wok, toss through the holy basil until well dispersed into the rest of the ingredients.
6. Serve immediately.
Hints and tips
• Pork soft bones are available in Asian butchers. Use small spare ribs if you can’t find them.
• You can precook the soft pork bones a couple of hours, or a day before serving. The stir-frying element is fast, but the prep will require some work. You can steam the bones and the paste beforehand, and these elements can be refrigerated or even frozen ahead of time and defrosted to use when you are ready to cook.
• Coconut nectar is available from health food stores.
• Thai basil can used instead of holy basil if you can’t source holy basil.
• “If serving as a stand alone dish, I recommend serving with steamed rice, fried eggs and cucumber slices and ‘do as Thais do’ – include a little separate bowl of fresh chilli slices in fish sauce as an accompaniment.”
APPLIANCE / FUNCTION
Palisa Anderson
Chef, restaurateur and author, Palisa Anderson is second-generation restauranteur and self-made first generational organic farmer. For Palisa, food is life. Having grown up in the kitchen of Sydney institution, Chat Thai, she soon expanded the family business to include several other eateries, which she now stocks with produce from her successful foray into organic farming, Boon Luck Farm in Byron Bay. “More than ever, an emphasis on quality, sustainability, authenticity and immunity boosting ingredients is important to us and vital to the well-being of our diners, our land and our children.”
