China · Cantonese
Pork Rib and Bitter Melon Soup
A light, clear soup of pork ribs and bitter melon, the bitterness kept mild by cooking the melon briefly at the end.
Bitter melon is the difficult ingredient here, because its bitterness is a matter of how long it cooks rather than how much you use: added late it stays gentle and reads as fresh, while added early it turns genuinely harsh. Cleaning it out properly matters as much as the cooking, since the seeds and the white pith carry most of the bitterness. Small dried shrimp are used for savouriness instead of salt.
Ingredients
- pork ribs250 g
- bitter melon100 g
- dried shrimp5 g
- gingerExact
Directions
- 1
Wash the ribs and chop them into small pieces, roughly four by three centimetres with a little variation (if you have no cleaver, ask the butcher to do it).
- 2
Put 700 ml of cold water and the ribs into a pan, bring to the boil, turn off the heat and lift the ribs out.
- 3
Cut the bitter melon in half, clear out the seeds and the white pith completely, cut it into strips about half a centimetre thick and rinse.
Source: HowToCook · WorldBite adaptation · Unlicense source text; bilingual recipe adapted by WorldBite.