Kuay Jub (Thai noodle soup with pork belly)
Kuay Jub. Thai rice noddle soup with pork belly. As far as I'm concerned, this is the ultimate comfort food. I recently ate this for the first time at my favorite local Thai restaurant, On's Kitchen, and have never been so satisfied. I went home afterwards and took a nice nap, cradling my filled gut. This is a soup that will make you want to change your undies afterwards. Climactic. While there is a lot of steps and ingredients to make this soup, they are all fairly simple. The pork belly is the only thing that really requires a lot of time to cook. Cooking the belly at 225 first helps render out a lot of the fat. Turning it up to 400 for another 20 minutes will make the skin nice and crispy. If you are good at multitasking, while the pork belly is cooking, fry up the tofu and drain on a paper towel. Hard boil your eggs. Boil your rice noodle flakes. Make your soup stock. Get 2 birds stoned at once.
Servings: 2
Ingredients
Pork Belly
- 2 8 oz skin on pork belly slabs
- 1/4 cup fish sauce
- 1/8 cup vinegar
- 1 tbsp salt
Noodle soup
- rice noodle flakes
- 1 cup bean sprouts
- 2 hard boiled eggs
- 2 cups fried tofu
- 5 cups water
- 3 tbsp light soy sauce
- 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
- 3 tbsp sugar
- 1/2 tbsp 5 spice powder
- 5 minced garlic cloves
- 1 tsp dried black peppercorns
- 1 tsp cilantro stalks diced
- 1/3 lb sliced pork
Garnish
- green onion
- cilantro
- fried garlic
Instructions
Pork Belly
- Mix fish sauce and vinegar together. Add the pork belly. Coat on all side and let marinate for 10 minutes.
- Put pork belly in a baking dish skin side up. Poke slits with a knife on the skin side to help render out the fat and make the skin crispy. Add salt to the skin side.
- Preheat oven to 225. Roast pork belly for 45 minutes. Turn up oven to 400 and roast pork belly for another 20 minutes until skin is crispy. Set aside
Noodle Soup
- In a stock pot, bring water, light and dark soy sauce, 5 spice powder, sugar, garlic, cilantro stalks, and peppercorns to a boil. Turn down to medium heat and add fried tofu and hard boiled eggs. Simmer covered for 15 minutes. Add sliced pork and cook for another 2 minutes.
- While the stock is cooking, soak 2 servings of rice noodle flakes in cold water for 3 minutes. Then add the rice noodle flakes to boling water and cook for 5 minutes. Drain.
Soup Assembly
- Put rice noodle flakes on the bottom. On top of them, in the center, add bean sprouts. On the left side of the sprouts, add chunks of pork belly. On the right side of the sprouts, add chunks of fried tofu from the stock. Take out one of the hard boiled eggs from the stock and slice in half. Put below he bean sprouts.
- Spoon over the soup ingredients the broth with the sliced pork. Garnish the top with green onion, cilantro, and fried garlic.
