Tom Luad Mu (ต้มเลือดหมู)

The Soup Built in the Bowl

ต้มเลือดหมู — pork blood soup — is assembled, not boiled. The rule that runs through every Thai source is stated bluntly by ครัวตุ๊กตา on Pantip: never boil everything together in one pot — blanch each item to order at serving time. Liver sliced thin, heart, stomach and intestine boiled separately until tender, blood in bite-size blocks, greens dropped in hot water only in the last minutes. Aroifin's commercial batch says the same about its greens: ivy gourd, crown daisy and the rest go in only in the final five to ten minutes.

The broth is the other discipline. Pantip's home cook adds the bones only after the boil has calmed — into a rolling boil, and the broth clouds. Every source skims: Aroifin skims "constantly for a clear soup", ครัวตุ๊กตา simmers her bones one to two hours doing the same. TrueID goes further and strains the finished stock through a sieve before it ever meets the bowl.

What lands in the bowl is a matter of taste and budget. The stall version carries the full offal board — liver, heart, spleen, stomach, intestine, blood. ครัวตุ๊กตา's family pot adds pork crackling. TrueID's adds crispy pork belly, unique among the sources. And Pantip's "ตามใจฉัน" — to my own taste — version skips offal entirely: just seasoned pork balls and blood, for people who want the soup without the organs. Kapook's home version is the only one that records the classic yellow-chilli and vinegar dipping sauce that belongs on the side.

The Recipe (home version, from Kapook)

For the dipping sauce: 2 yellow spur chillies, ½ tbsp garlic pounded fine with a pinch of salt, 2 tsp vinegar stirred in. The stall board (Wongnai): liver, spleen, heart, pork balls and blood, each blanched separately and rested in room-temperature water, with pickled garlic brine in the broth. The no-offal pot (Pantip): spare ribs and a chicken carcass simmered with bruised garlic, peppercorns and celery root; seasoned minced-pork balls and a block of blood, lettuce lining the bowl.

The Method

1. Blanch the meats. Bring a pot of water to a medium boil and blanch the minced pork, liver and stomach until cooked, then lift out and drain. Each item separately, never all at once.
2. The greens. Blanch the ivy gourd leaves or spinach and put them in the serving bowl first — the leaves line the bowl and catch the hot broth.
3. The blood. Bring the pork bone stock to a medium boil, add the blood and cook briefly — overboiled blood turns rubbery and porous. Lift the blood and the blanched offal into the bowl with the preserved mustard greens and Chinese celery.
4. The pour. Pour the hot stock over everything and top with fried garlic and ground pepper.
5. The dip. Pound the yellow chillies and garlic fine, season with a pinch of salt, then stir in the vinegar. Serve the soup with the dip on the side, and rice.

Where Thai Sources Disagree

How Western Versions Get It Wrong

• One-pot boiling. The single most repeated Thai rule: blanch each item to order, never boil everything together. Offal boiled in the broth turns it cloudy and greasy.
• Overboiling the blood. Blood gets a brief cook in medium-boiling stock, no more. Overboiled blood turns rubbery, porous and grey.
• Bones into a rolling boil. The bones go in only after the boil has calmed — a rolling boil throws up scum and clouds the broth irrecoverably.
• Greens cooked through. Ivy gourd leaves are blanched in the last minutes, or dropped raw into the bowl to be wilted by the poured stock. Long-cooked greens turn the soup green and bitter.
• Skipping the skim. The broth's clarity is the dish's pride — Aroifin skims constantly, and every home recipe skims the scum throughout the simmer.

UK Ingredient Notes

• Pork blood: blocks at Thai, Chinese and Vietnamese grocers, usually frozen. Cook it gently — the blocks sold abroad are firmer than Thai fresh blood, as ครัวตุ๊กตา notes.
• Pork liver, stomach and intestine: a proper butcher will order them; Chinese supermarkets carry them fresh or frozen.
• Ivy gourd leaves (ตำลึง) are rarely exported — Kapook's own substitute is spinach (ปวยเล้ง); lettuce is the stall stand-in.
• Chinese celery and preserved mustard greens (ตั้งฉ่าย): both standard at East Asian grocers.
• Pork bone stock: make it or use a light chicken/pork stock — avoid dark beef stock, which colours the broth.

Sources

This recipe is translated from the following Thai-language sources. Where they disagree, we've said so.