044/18: Grilled pork skewers (with pandan leaf)
Really enjoying the Thai dishes lately and with some pork shoulder sitting in the freezer I was keen to find a good recipe to cook with it. Looking through the list I spotted Grilled pork skewers (with pandan leaf) or Muu Bing (หมูปิ้ง) – I have cooked with a lot of different leaves lately so the pandan leaves probably swung it for me, would be the first time I have cooked with those!
The recipe was from Thai Street Food by David Thomson.
The Meat:
1kg of Pork Shoulder from Turner and George. £20 for 2.5kg and this was around a kilo from a previous order.
The Ingredients:
The Pandanus leaves and coriander roots were from Thai Food Online, everything else should be fairly easy to get in a supermarket. Palm sugar can be hard to find sometimes but it’s randomly located usually!
The Prep:
I sliced the pork shoulder into thin pieces about 2 to 3 cm square.
In a jug I blitzed coriander root, salt, garlic, and pepper to make a paste then combined it with palm sugar, dark soy sauce, fish sauce and rapeseed oil. This was then thoroughly mixed into the pork:
This looked like a potentially messy cook and my Kamado Joe is still gleaming so I fired up the Weber Kettle with a full chimney of the Oak and Beech lumpwood I am testing for a local supplier. The lit charcoal was spread evenly all over the base of the grill.
Some nice, long bamboo skewers had been soaked for half an hour and were used to slot the pork on. I tried to spear each piece of pork twice and stretch it along the skewer so a good bit of surface area was exposed and also made sure they weren’t too cramped together so they would cook evenly.
The Cook:
Cooking everything directly I spread the skewers over the grill. No smoking wood and I kept the lid off.
Time for the pandanus leaves! You bend the leaves in half and cut them straight across for a smooth edge. Then you slice upwards very finely to make a brush which is used to brush coconut cream onto the meat. Not the best photo but it really was like a brush.
After a few minutes I rotated the meat and brushed the coconut cream on. By the time I went from left to right and took the photo the first few skewers had absorbed the coconut cream.
I kept rotating the meat and brushing it with the coconut cream. 
It was taking on a fantastic colour, smelt great too! 
Time to Eat:
After around 10 minutes I tasted a few bits and it seemed good to go. Served up with Glutinous rice with chopped peanuts and coriander.
Summary:
Another great Thai dish which was really easy to prepare and cook. The meat tasted fantastic and reminded me of our travels in Asia, it was cold and snowing when I cooked this so it would be good to cook it again if the sun returns!
I was going to cook this on my Prakti stove as I haven’t used that for a while but the skewers were too big and I was rushing a bit to get dinner ready, the Weber Kettle did a great job.
| Cook Difficulty: | 1/5 |
| Cook Duration: | Quick: 2/5 |
| Cook Equipment: | Weber Kettle |
| Cook Method: | Direct |
| Charcoal: | Local supplier Oak and Beech |
| Smoking Wood: | N/A |
| Cook temperature: | Unknown |
| Cook time: | 10 minutes |
| Internal temperature: | Unknown |
| Notes: | No major changes |
The Book:
The recipe is from the book Thai Street Food by David Thomson. I remember this book being quite expensive when I bought it but it is massive and the photos are fantastic. At the moment it’s £89.99 on Amazon!
