Your Kids Will Eat Bitter Melon With This Recipe

9 February 2023

Back when I was a kid, I didn't like eating bitter melon because of its bitter taste. My mother would often tell us of its health benefits just to persuade us to eat it but to no avail. However, when she cooked it with eggs one time, despite the bitter taste, I liked the recipe. Since then, I like eating bitter melon fried with eggs. As I grew up, I tasted different varieties of bitter melon recipes. That's when I appreciated it even more aside from its healthy food.

There are actually ways to remove the bitter taste of the bitter melon. The first step is blanching it in boiling water with salt and oil. The second is soaking it with salt and then squeezing the bitter juice out of it. These are the methods I know. Then I found more ways to remove the bitter taste of the bitter melon. You can read it here.

For today's recipe, I'll share with you this steamed bitter melon stuffed with ground pork, mushroom, and chestnut.

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With these simple ingredients, your kids would surely eat bitter melon. The process is just easy and doesn't require a long cooking time as well. This is perfect for lunch and dinner.

Let's start the cooking!

There are different kinds of bitter melon. But for this recipe, I chose the one in the photo as I want a circle shape of the bitter melon so I could stuff the pork in the middle.

Cooking Procedures

The first thing to do is to cut the bitter melon into circle shapes as shown in the photo. Then sprinkle some salt. Leave it for about 10 minutes or so until the bitter juice releases. Since I can not squeeze it out as it will break the gourd, I just washed it well with water.

But I discovered that with or without this procedure, the bitter melon won't taste bitter after cooking since the bitter juice will be released when steaming the bitter melon.

The next step is to mince the pork. You can either buy ready-minced pork or minced it yourself. Although it's a bit time-consuming and hassle, I like mincing the pork at home as I find it more hygienic, and the taste is truly different compared to the minced pork from the market. You can try it by yourself. And if you have a meat grinder at home, then it will come in handy.

After mincing the pork, season it with soy sauce, salt, and pepper. You can also pour sesame oil to add fragrance, but this is optional. The measurement is depending on your taste preference. Some are even adding some sugar to the marinade. However, the water chestnut already has a sweet flavor.

Then mince the water chestnut and shiitake mushrooms. Take note that these mushrooms are dried ones. So I soaked them beforehand. You can use fresh mushrooms to omit the soaking process. Besides, fresh mushrooms taste better too. Save some bigger chunks of mushrooms for toppings.

Combine the minced pork, chestnut, and mushrooms. Mixed them all well.

It's time for stuffing!

This is my favorite part. But before stuffing, I'm coating the inner surface with flour. This will make the pork mixture stick to the inner surface and won't fall out. Next, just stuff the minced pork-chestnut-mushroom mixture into the hole of the bitter melon. Lastly, topped it with bigger slices of mushrooms.

If you have some dried goji berries in your pantry, you can use them as toppings to make the food more appealing to kids. I also like the sweet flavor of goji berries. And for those who can't find water chestnuts and mushrooms, you can use other common ingredients like corn and carrots just to add more flavors and colors to the recipe. But even plain pork with green and white onions will do as well. But I don't like eating onions, lol.

Then steam the bitter melon for about 15 minutes. If your sizes are bigger, you can add more time.

As you can see in the photo above, I added peppers too. This method of cooking isn't just for bitter melon. You can also try other vegetables like peppers, zucchini, eggplant, hairy gourd, and others of your liking.

Here's the steamed zucchini with the same stuffings I cooked before.

Here it is, the steamed bitter melon stuffed with minced pork, water chestnut, and mushroom.

Do not discard the sauce, you can pour it into a pan, reheat it on low fire, then add some slurry (diluted cornstarch) to thicken the sauce. And pour it back on top of the steamed bitter melon.

But when using bitter melon and peppers, the sauce can be bitter and spicy, you can simply make a separate sauce. Just combine oyster sauce, water, and cornflour, or use other sauces of your choice.

Cute isn't it?

And here's a big platter of this recipe I made recently using bitter melon and bell peppers. You can tell how I love this recipe, lol. Of course, these are many so they were shared with these fellas at home.

The combination of minced pork with the sweetness of chestnuts and the earthy flavor of mushrooms is really delicious. You should try one yourself.

I hope you like it. Thanks for dropping by. Happy cooking 😊.

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