Tender Pork Shoulders With Coconut Juice
If you haven't tried pork with coconut water/juice, you are missing something real good. Let me introduce to you one of my favorite pork recipes today. It's tender, flavorful and easy to make (as always my recipe goal).
You can try the marinade with chicken if you prefer more than pork. It will be great as well, no worries!
A lot of you have asked about what is the five spice powder in my recipes, so here it is!
Five-spice powder is a seasoning blend of ground spices, appearing as a dry brown powder. A typical recipe for five-spice powder includes Szechuan (Sichuan) peppercorns, ground cloves, fennel, cinnamon, and star anise.
Five-spice powder can also have more than 5 spices such as anise seeds, ginger root, nutmeg, turmeric, cardamom, amomum villosum pods (similar to cardamom), licorice, orange peel, or galangal.
I always have one or 2 bottles of this mixed spice in my pantry because it's great to use in so many recipes!
- 300 g pork shoulder (slice into wide 1 cm thick pieces)
- 2 lemongrass (white part, minced)
- 3 small garlic cloves (minced)
- 1/2 tsp black pepper
- 1 1/2 tbsp sugar
- 2 tbsp ketchup
- 1 1/2 tbsp fish sauce (use soy sauce if you want)
- 2 tbsp soy sauce
- 1/4 tsp five spice powder (store bought, you can find at Asian stores)
- 160 ml coconut juice/water
- 1 tsp annatto oil (optional, it's for the color, skip if you don't have and the taste is still there!)
- 1 tsp cooking oil
- 3 small slices of ginger
Add all the ingredients into a big bowl except cooking oil, ginger and 100 ml of coconut juice (we add it later)
Cover with plastic wrap and let it rest for at least 2 hours.
Once the meat is ready, heat a frying pan over medium heat, add cooking oil. Place pork slices (save the marinade liquid) and let it charged or until the bottoms turned brown, flip and add the marinade water. Cover with a lid and bring it to a boil.
Once it's boiled, add 3 small slices of ginger and flip the pork. Cover and cook until the sauce got thickened.
Add coconut water and bring it to a boil again, flip a few times if needed to make sure the sauce is even both sides of the pork.
Simmer until the sauce is thickened as you prefer. Transfer to slice and serve over hot steamed rice. OMG so good 💘
