Recipe: Pancit Molo Soup

A heaping, hot bowl of pancit molo always transports me back to my childhood home. During school breaks (back in the day haha), my siblilngs and I would cook a potful of this for meryenda. I couldn't make it from scratch then but my mom always had several packs of the soup in stock for us. 

This was only my second attempt to make the soup from scratch. I got the recipe from a college friend and tweaked it a bit to include carrots for the kid. Our first time was a huge mess because majority of the meat balls came off the molo wrappers it eventually looked like a meat ball soup instead of pancit molo. This time around though I'm happy to report that we were almost successful  and so when Maqui requested for the recipe, I did not hesitate a bit. So here it is:

Prep time: 30 mins
Cooking time: 30 mins

What you will need:

1/2 kilo lean ground pork
1/2 kilo chicken soup pack, boiled and flaked
2 big white onions, chopped
1 bunch of green spring onions, chopped
1 medium sized carrot, minced/chopped finely
1 pack store-bought molo wrapper
1 small can full cream evaporated milk (optional if you're not fond of milky soup)
about 8 cups chicken stock (saved from the chicken soup pack)
olive oil
2 tbsp patis (fish sauce)
salt and pepper to taste
1 head garlic, minced and fried over low fire till slightly brown (for garnish)
All-purpose flour (to dust the balls and prevent them from sticking together)

How I did it:

1. Boil the chicken soup pack till meat is tender. It usually takes just about 10 mins for chicken meat to tenderize but since I plan to use the broth, I boiled it for 20-30 mins. I threw in a handful of chopped onions  as well to make the broth more flavorful.
2. Set aside chicken to cool for flaking. Set aside flaked meat and discard the bones.
3. Combine spring onions and carrots with ground pork. (I usually work with my hands. I'm confident they're mixed evenly that way). Season with a dash of salt but with more pepper (maybe half a teaspoon)
4. Spoon about half a teaspoon of the ground pork mixture over the molo/wanton wrapper and seal as tightly as possible (the way you would seal dumplings). Do this till all your mixture is wrapped up. Once in a while dust with all-purpose flour to prevent the dumplings from sticking together.
5. Saute your onions in olive oil till fragrant and translucent.
6. Add in flaked chicken meat and stir fry for a minute.
7. Pour in chicken stock and boil.
8. When stock is boiling, lower fire to simmer and drop the dumplings one by one (dumping them slowly is the key to preventing them from breaking)
9. Simmer for 15-20 minutes. Season again with fish sauce, salt and pepper according to your taste.
10. Pour in the evaporated milk about 5 minutes before you put the fire off.
11. Garnish with chopped spring onions and fried garlic.
12. Enjoy!!!!

Our recipe yielded about 50+ dumplings. The big pot lasted us till lunch time. It was my little girl's first time to try eating pancit molo and she liked it so much she requested for me to cook it again. Requests like this from my picky eater is always a huge compliment for me!