Craving for hot Bak Kut Teh soup and too lazy to go out for it? Check out this recipe of cooking Bak Kut Teh using the rice cooker and you can have it anytime you feel like it. The actual cooking of the soup itself is less than 5 mins as the cooker does everything. The hardest part is the preparation of the ingredients.
The main ingredients needed include pork ribs, you can choose any kind of cuts you like but my family love the long back ribs.
Main ingredients:
- 6 cloves of garlic inclusive of their skin
- 3 ginger slices
- 300 grams of pork ribs
- 2 packet of A1 soup spices ( you can use any brand of soup spice if this is not available)
- 3 tablespoons of dark soy sauce
- 2 tablespoons of soy sauce
- 2 tablespoons of oyster sauce
First, for the preparation of the pork to remove the raw porky smell from the ribs, you can wash them ribs using cornflour and water. Rub and bones and bloody part to remove any raw smell. Once this is done, the ribs are ready
Place the soup spice pack into the rice cooker
Add the garlic and ginger slices
Put in all the ingredients for the soup like your pork ribs or other kinds of meat
Add in all the sauces in the recipe ( you can see in my picture I have also added pig stomach to the soup as my family love it )
Add at least 1.5 litres of water and make sure the water covers the ingredients
Set the rice cooker on the soup program or standard cook if you do not have this program. This should take only 1 to 1.5 hours. One tip to share is that you can remove the ribs once they are cooked to prevent overcooking them and making the meat tough. I normally remove the meat and continue cooking other ingredients like mushrooms or pig stomach longer as they need a longer time to soften.
After removing the ribs, this is when you can add other ingredients. For an authentic Malaysian Bak Kut Teh experience, I usually add enoki mushrooms, brown button mushrooms and fried beancurd skin. There is no exact quantity to add for these as it depends on your preference. I love the beancurd skin so I tend to add a lot.
When adding the other ingredients, you can also add 2 pieces of rock sugar to increase the sweetness of the soup. I usually start cooking 3 hours before for sufficient time to cook the soup for all the flavours to be released. If your cooker stops the program and go into keep warm mode, just re-adjust and put it back to cooking.
This is the final results of the Bak Kut Teh meal which really took minimal efforts since you just throw everything into the cooker. The only time consuming step is the preparation of the ingredients.
To balance the meal, you can serve your soup with some fresh lettuce
You can also add in pig organs which I usually cook them separately in another pot with the soup from the cooker as my dad can’t take them. The soup cooked with organs are generally thicker with more protein from the organs itself.
If you are cooking pig stomach like me, you have to cook it whole and only slice it when it is fully cooked and served them sliced with the soup.
Just a note that this version is an extremely herbal and thick version so if you prefer your soup with a lighter taste, you can use just 1 packet of soup spice instead of 2 packets. If you prefer the Singaporean style of soup, you can also buy the peppery soup spice instead of the herbal once.
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