Chinese Recipes | Cooking Tips | Good Eats

My friend Shan from Singapore loves soup. Especially if it’s easy to make, like her favorite black bean peanut pork rib soup. Quite a mouthful of words, but wait till you taste it! Shan uses the slow cooker to cook this overnight, but I couldn’t wait six to eight hours for the soup to be ready, so I did mine the two hours method.

This is the first time I am using black beans and I am excited to see if the soup really tasted as sweet Shan’s smile when I saw her enjoy the soup of her labor.

Ingredients (Serves 2):

- 1/2 lb Pork Ribs
- 1/4 cup Dried Black Beans
- 1/4 cup Dried Peanuts
- 1 tsp Dried Mini Shrimp
- 1 tsp Dried Mini Scallops
- 1 clove garlic, crushed
- a few slices of ginger
- 5 cups water
- salt
- white pepper

Method:

1. Pre-soak the black beans and dried peanuts in seperate bowls of water for about half and hour. Drain.

2. Heat a saucepan with 1 tbsp of vegetable oil. Medium heat.

3. During this time, boil about 5 cups of water in the kettle.

4. Season the pork ribs with salt and semi-cook them in the saucepan with garlic, ginger, mini dried shrimp and mini dried scallops, until you can smell the fragrance of the pork. (The pork is saying “I am ready!”)

5. Pour the boiled water into the saucepan.

6. Add the black beans and peanuts.

7. Allow to boil and then bring to a simmer for 1.5 - 2 hours.

8. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Cooking Tips:

The black beans and peanuts are pre-soaked for half and hour so that they can cook faster.

My analysis:

The pork ribs from my two-hour method were not as tender as slow cooked pork ribs, simmered for six to eight hours.

They also tasted a bit bland after the simmering as all the pork flavour has gone into the soup.

However, the soup was really really sweet. So I concluded that instead of buying pork ribs, I can also use lean pork and get the same effect of Shan’s Black Bean Peanut Pork Rib Soup.

I am smiling.