Pork braised in coconut juice with eggs recipe (thit heo kho)

Created by Nhut Hunyh & Jeremy McNamara

6 comments

Enlarge text

Rating:

4/ 5 stars 24 Votes

Cuisine: Vietnamese
Prep Time: 3 hr(s) 25 min(s)
Cook Time: 2 hr(s) 25 min(s)
Serves 6–8

For Nhut and his seven brothers and sisters, this dish was looked forward to all year – his beloved mother used to prepare it for Vietnamese New Year. He says, ‘In the years when we were farmers and very poor in the Vietnamese countryside, meat was hard to get so this dish was so good ... And now I love watching the silence as people discover the rich flavours of this great regional Vietnamese dish in my restaurant.’

Coconut juice – the clear water from the centre of the coconut rather than the milk or cream that is extracted from the flesh – imparts a sweet, mellow coconut flavour to the dish and is available frozen from Asian supermarkets.

Ingredients

1 kg pork belly (not too fatty), cut into 5 cm cubes
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
4 shallots, finely chopped
2 spring onions, bruised and finely chopped (roots included)
3 tbsp fish sauce
3 tbsp light soy sauce
1 ½ tbsp dark soy sauce
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp grated palm sugar or dark brown sugar
4 star anise
1 tbsp vegetable oil
½ onion, finely chopped
750 ml young coconut juice
375 ml water
8 eggs, hard-boiled and peeled
coriander

View conversion table

Preparation

Combine the pork, garlic, shallots, spring onion, fish sauce, soy sauces, pepper, sugar and star anise in a bowl, stirring to coat the pork. Marinate in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours or ideally overnight.

Heat the oil in a large, heavy-based saucepan and add the onion. Fry until golden then remove the pork from the marinade and add to the pan. Seal over high heat. Add the marinade, coconut juice and water. Bring to the boil and skim off any scum that rises to the surface. Gently simmer for 1 hour, skimming occasionally. Add the eggs and simmer for a further hour. Garnish with coriander and serve with jasmine rice.

SBS cook’s notes
Oven temperatures are for conventional; if using fan-forced (convection), reduce the temperature by 20˚C. | We use Australian tablespoons and cups: 1 teaspoon equals 5 ml; 1 tablespoon equals 20 ml; 1 cup equals 250 ml. | All herbs are fresh (unless specified) and cups are lightly packed. | All vegetables are medium size and peeled, unless specified. | All eggs are 55–60 g, unless specified.

If you enjoyed this Pork braised in coconut juice with eggs recipe (thit heo kho) then browse more Vietnamese recipes, meat recipes and our most popular hainanese chicken rice recipe.

Vietnamese Restaurants

Displaying 10 of 276 Vietnamese Restaurants.

	Restaurant	Book Online	Suburb
1.	Le Bich		Balmain
2.	Thy Thy 1		Richmond
3.	Kinh Do		Macquarie
4.	Pho Phu Quoc		Dickson
5.	Tu Do		O'Connor
6.	Phi Yen		Northbridge
7.	Viet Hoa		Perth
8.	New Saigon Vietnamese		Adelaide
9.	Vietnam Restaurant		Pennington
10.	Green Papaya		East Brisbane

View all Vietnamese restaurants | Start a new search

Comments (6)

10 Mar 2013 01:39 AEST

Quoc Hung

bonnyrigg

Never see anyone use soy dark..or light..

All i do is marinate the meat with garlic..and fish sauce sugar...for 30min in a pot ready to cook..just add extra fish sauce together with coconut juice..not too much..simmering till desired colouring..then i add more coconut juice....i never use water....once added more coconut juice and the eggs..and cooking untill meat tender..all up 2-3hrs..hmm...plus this dish dont have to be dark in colour.. got pics to proved.. http://www.flickr.com/photos/93902352@N03/

Agree(3 people agree)

Disagree(0 people disagree)

18 Jan 2012 07:55 AEST

quinton

sunshine

palm sugar

1:21

Agree(0 people agree)

Disagree(0 people disagree)

29 Nov 2010 03:42 AEST

Linda

Norther Beaches NSW

Restaurant quality- Yummo!!

This was a fantastic and relatively easy recipe. The star anise and young coconut juice really make it, we thought we would leave the egg out next time, ras it eally did not need it. The butcher cubed the pork belly for me and left the bone in, this made for fantastic flavour. I did cut the fat off of about 1/2 of the cubes to bring the fat content down. The kitchen did smell like a Chinese restaurant for a week! Loved it tho...

Agree(0 people agree)

Disagree(3 people disagree)

21 Jul 2010 01:12 AEST

Aaas

2000

Somewhat's ok

The way u cook this recipe is like Chinese, I think the vietway don't use herb >_> never seen granddad use 5spice in his, n one of the thing I like about it is it's the simplest way of making that dish, yet bring out the goodness of the meat. U don't need a bunch of mumbles jumbles stuff to have a great thit kho to. N no marinate meat lol.

Agree(7 people agree)

Disagree(9 people disagree)

27 Jun 2010 10:31 AEST

Tony VU

Sunnybank Brisbane

Fabulous

I cant be said without axgeration that this is one the recipe which most famous in every vietnames family. If you never adapted to this recipe try to figure out to make it yours at home and have it in the winter time with your family and ofcourse serve hot with rice is really fanfuckingtastic. enjoy

Agree(1 people agree)

Disagree(1 people disagree)

14 Oct 2008 11:40 AEST

Caroline Ekin

Murray Bridge

Superb!

We found this recipe really amazing.....it's very rich and we don't over indulge in it, but the taste sensation is superb.....we have to cook it every time particular friends of ours come for dinner! Thank you for a great program and looooove Mauve's tops! Kind regards Caroline Ekin

Agree(20 people agree)

Disagree(1 people disagree)

Comment on this recipe

PLEASE NOTE: All submitted comments become the property of SBS. We reserve the right to edit and/or amend submitted comments. HTML tags other than paragraph, line break, bold or italics will be removed from your comment.