Vietnamese Stuffed Tomatoes (Ca Chua Nhoi Thit) Recipe

This is a popular comfort food at Vietnamese family dinner table. Ca chua nhoi thit or stuffed tomato is tomato filled with meat paste. But unlike Vietnamese stuffed tofu (Dau Hu Don Thit), the meat paste is made of ground pork, black ear mushrooms and bean thread noodles.

There are several methods on how to fix this hybrid dish such as: pan-fry, braise and simmer, or steaming. But I think baking is good way to cut down the cooking time especially when you make great quantity of stuffed tomatoes. It's quite time consuming to pan-fry the stuffed tomatoes in small batch.

Ca chua nhoi thit is delicious, tasty yet very beautiful and elegant. The stuffing itself is very Asian but the sauce is French inspired. Sweet tomatoes and the savory filling make this is a really good dish that goes well with rice or French bread.

Ingredients:

20 - 24 riped tomatoes

1/3 cup dried black ear mushrooms

2 oz dried bean thread noodles

1 lbs ground pork

2 spring onions, chopped

1/4 onion, finely chopped

2 tbsp cornstarch

1 tbsp oyster sauce

1/4 tsp black pepper

1 tsp sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tsp vegetable oil

• Prepare 2 cups of boiling water. Then soak the black ear fungus in hot boiling water for about 3 minutes. Drain and chop finely. Set aside.
• In a bowl, place dried bean thread noodles and cover with water. Soak them for about 20 minutes. Then drain and chop into 1-inch threads. Set aside.
• In a mixing bowl, combine black ear mushroom, bean thread noodles, onion, spring onions, ground pork, sugar, salt, black pepper, oyster sauce and cornstarch. Mix the mixture until well-combined.
• Using a sharp knife, slice off the tops of the tomatoes and use a small spoon to hollow the core and seeds out. Then fill each tomato with pork mixture.
• Preheat oven to 375 F. Place tomatoes in aluminum foil lined baking sheet. Bake them for 30 minutes.
• Serve with warm steamed rice and tomato sauce (see Xiu Mai to get tomato sauce recipe).