Pork and Cucumber Soup

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Cucumber soup feature image

Tom Jued Tang Kwa Yad Sai

Serves 2 Cooks in 30 minutes Difficulty Easy

Tom Jued Tang Kwa Yad Sai or pork and cucumber soup is a Chinese style clear soup. It uses simple ingredients that should be readily available from your local supermarket.

This is one of my favourite soups which I learnt to enjoy as a child. My mother had a garden at our family home and she grew a lot of vegetables. Sometimes she grew to much to sell and she would use the excess vegetables for our family meals.

The only problem was I didn’t really enjoy eating vegetables as a kid. I really liked pork and noodles so my mother would cook this soup as a way to trick me to eat cucumber, which was always in abundant supply.

I know cucumber is not an obvious choice for western style soups but it is a delicious ingredient. It soaks up a lot of the liquid and becomes really soft.

Maybe if you have kids who do not like vegetables you can win them over with this soup. Hope you enjoy.

Ingredients

  • 2 cucumbers
  • 100g minced pork
  • A handful of glass noodles
  • 1/4 carrot, sliced
  • 1 sprig coriander, roughly chopped
  • 2 coriander roots
  • 1 sprig flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped
  • 1 packet of egg tofu, sliced
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 1 tbsp soy sauce
  • 1/2 tbsp chicken stock
  • 1/2 tbsp sugar
  • 1/2 tsp pepper
  • 1/2 tsp salt
Ingredients for cucumber soup
What you will need.

Method

  1. Wash and peel the cucumbers and cut into 3cm long pieces. Carefully remove the seeds to leave you with a cucumber tube.
  2. Smash the garlic and coriander roots in a pestle and mortar.
  3. In a bowl, mix the garlic and coriander roots with the minced pork, glass noodles and soy sauce.
  4. Stuff the hollowed out cucumbers with this pork mixture.
  5. Bring 250ml water to the boil, then add the stuffed cucumbers.
  6. Add the carrot, chicken stock, sugar, salt and pepper and simmer for 5-10 minutes depending on how soft you like your vegetables.
  7. Finally, add the tofu, parsley and coriander, give a last good stir and remove from the heat.
Hollowed out cucumbers
Hollowed out cucumbers.
Stuffing the cucumbers with pork and noodles
Stuff the cucumbers with the pork and noodles.

To Serve

Serve in a bowl. You can eat this as a light meal or as an accompaniment to a larger Thai meal.

Hope you enjoy Tom Jued Tang Kwa Yad Sai by Apple 🍎 Riverside Thai Cooking in Khao Lak.