Easy Pata Tim Recipe

Pata Tim, also spelled patatim, is a Filipino-Chinese dish. It is a braised pork hock dish slow-cooked until very tender in various spices sweetened with sugar. Some vegetables, like pechay and mushrooms, are also added.

The dish is commonly served in Chinese-Filipino restaurants particularly in the City of Manila.

Pata tim, like the more common humba, is derived from the Chinese red braised pork. It is closer to the original dish than humba, in that it sometimes uses Chinese rice wine and other Chinese spices and condiments. However, it is more commonly cooked closer to the Filipino paksiw na pata, but it does not use vinegar or uses only a very small amount of it. Like humba, it can also add common Filipino ingredients like pineapples, banana flowers, saba bananas, and patis. The name is a shortened version of pata itim, literally “black pork hock”, from pata (“pork hock” or “pig’s trotters”) and itim (“black”).

Wikipedia

The most basic pata tim recipe uses what Filipinos call as pata (pork hock in English). Traditionally, pata tim is cooked whole and not chopped. The easy way to cook pata tim, as described below, is to mix all the ingredients together with the pata and simmer until tender. The broth is then used to make the sauce. The recipe used lettuce as garnish but we can replace it with blanched pechay. Then we serve with rice.

This dish could be modified. You may want to broil the pata for 1 to 2 minutes to prevent the skin from shrinking when boiled.

Another option is to pre-boil the pata for around 20 minutes before adding the ingredients. This allows you to remove scum and impurities from the pata. You can discard the water later and continue with the recipe.

For more flavor, some cooks will add pork cubes. This is all entirely up to you.

Filipino Cookbooks:

Recipe for Pata Tim:

Other PORK recipes may be found HERE.

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