Pork

Japanese Braised Pork Belly (Buta no Kakuni)

dianakuan — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:55:47 +0000

At a dinner party earlier this week, a nutritionist from China told me point-blank the main problem with American diets is the overwhelming meat consumption. Meat was a bigger culprit that carbs or complex sugars, he said. Americans think nothing of eating a 22 oz. steak or a bucket of fried chicken in a single meal, with potato as a "vegetable" side. There's not moderation in this country, and that's why obesity is such a huge problem. I nodded and agreed, mentioning, among other things, the now notorious Double Down.

The next night, without thinking, I made a pound of pork belly for dinner.

To be fair, it was one of those cold and windy April days, and braised pork just seemed like a good idea. Frequent readers of this blog may remember that I have numerous other pork recipes. I mean, it's kind of a sin for someone of Asian descent to not be obsessed with fatty pork.

Minced Pork and Shiitake Noodles

dianakuan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:14:04 +0000

Some of you may be familiar with a Cantonese dish called yuk bang, which roughly translates into "pork pie." It's pretty much the Chinese version of meat loaf. But while meat loaf can be found on menus in both Southern and hipster diners, yuk bang is hardly ever served outside home. To call it rustic would be an overly generous. You mix ground pork with pickled mustard plant, splash on a bit of soy sauce, then press your ball of pork into a metal plate and steam it. As simple and unphotogenic as pork pie is, it tastes amazing mixed with white rice.

In the absence of pickled mustard plant, and for leftovers that I wouldn't feel weird bringing to work, I turn to these minced pork and shiitake noodles.

If you have ever been to Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, or Japan, you may be familiar with a dish of minced pork ladled over a bowl of boiled noodles. It's pure comfort food whenever you're exhausted and need nourishment, stat. Like, when traveling on foot in a subtropical Asian city, or even after staring at a computer screen all morning.

The simplest preparation involves just minced pork, onions or shallots, scallions, all simmered in sake or Chinese rice wine. I throw in finely chopped shiitake mushrooms for extra flavor (lately, using these ugly shiitakes.) You can really use any kind of noodles, but I prefer soba for their ability to not become saturated by sauces.

Recipe: Pork and Shrimp Siu Mai / Shao Mai

dianakuan — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:39:24 +0000

I love owning a bamboo steamer, if for no other reason that to display around the kitchen. It's not only a conversation starter whenever new guests visit but also a handy tool for food photography. (Gotta play up the Asian theme sometimes.) Plus, a set of basket and lid usually costs less than $10 in Chinatown.

Of course, there are times when bamboo steamers are useful for actual cooking. Aside from har gow, siu mai is possibly the most requested dim sum standard in my family, with the reliable crinkly yellow wonton wrappers snugly encasing the pork-dominant filling. I haven't tackled har gow at home yet, possibly because even 95% of all restaurants I visit fail at the texture of the translucent wrapper. But siu mai I can do.

Yes, this is the same dim sum treat that's also spelled shumai, siew mai, and siu mai due to the lack of standard Cantonese Romanization. (In Mandarin it's just shao mai). Wrapping is not so complex. Folding siu mai is even easier than folding wontons and potstickers, which requires sealing. With siu mai you just need to form the wrapper into a cup and press the sides against the filling.

Try it the next time you're craving dim sum but the nearest good restaurant is too far of a drive. Or flight.

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Recipe: Pork and Cucumber Stir-fry

dianakuan — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:36:58 +0000

Until the age of 6, I had never eaten raw unpickled cucumbers. Like everyone else in my Cantonese family, I ate cucumbers only in stir-fries, never imagining that they could be served any other way. So it was a shock in the elementary school cafeteria to find that Americans eat this thing called a salad, with itty bitty pieces of raw unseasoned cucumber, mixed with equally bland raw carrots and iceberg lettuce. I'll admit. It took me a few years to get used to raw cucumbers, especially when the accompaniment was Thousand Island dressing.

Lately I've rediscovered the joys of stir-fried cucumbers. They're sauce sponges, soaking up the best flavors of whatever meat or liquid they're cooked with. The best kind to use for stir-frying are Chinese cucumbers, also called Asian or Peking cucumbers, the long skinny ones with a bumpy outside. They tend to be more crisp, though other varieties would also work.

In this pork stir-fry, you just need to cook the meat, set it aside, and briefly stir-fry and steam the vegetables for a few minutes. If you have extra pieces left over, make a Sichuan cucumber salad.

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Other Chinese pork recipes:

Cantonese Roast Pork

Spicy Black Bean Spare Ribs

dianakuan — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:27:22 +0000

Love black bean sauce? Head over to Rasa Malaysia, where I have a guest post recipe up for spicy black bean spare ribs. While you're there, check out Bee's other great recipes for Chinese and Southeast Asian food.

And if one black bean recipe isn't enough, try these others:

Eggplant, Cumin, and Black Bean Salad

Spicy Chicken in Black Bean Sauce

Twice-Cooked Pork (Huiguo rou)

Chinese Steamed Fish with Black Bean and Ginger Sauce

Recipe: Pork Adobo

dianakuan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:42:58 +0000

I became addicted to adobo while living in Brooklyn. Albert, my roommate from Guam, made chicken adobo one night and handed me a plate with some fat chicken thighs, a thick brown sauce with onions, and a clump of rice. Keep in mind that at this time, I was making dainty hors d'oeuvres everyday in culinary school and hadn't eaten good home-cooked braised meat in months. One bite and I was in heaven.

"What's in this?" I asked.

"Soy sauce, vinegear, honey, pepper."

"No, there's something else," I insisted.

He whipped out a small spice bottle. Mrs. Dash Original Blend. Just what his mom used to use.

Now, I know Filipino and South Pacific families each have their own ways to cook adobo, a way of stewing meat in soy sauce, vinegar, bay leaf, and black pepper. Albert's method was not the precise formula of cookbooks. He sautéed his chicken legs and wings until crispy and brown, then threw in a rice-measuring cup filled a third of the way with vinegar and two-thirds with soy sauce. He dumped in another rice cup full of water. After 15 minutes he took a bear-shaped bottle of Busy Bee honey and squeezed enough onto the chicken to make your teeth tingle just to watch. He threw Mrs. Dash into the skillet like he was scattering seeds. This haphazard cooking produced some of the most sublime chicken I had ever tasted.

Recipe: Cantonese Roast Pork (Char Siu)

dianakuan — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:16:37 +0000

Along with wonton noodle soup, char siu is the Cantonese people's greatest contribution to mankind. Really, who can resist slices of half-fatty, half-lean roast pork, crisp and dripping with caramelized juices?

You know those enticing pieces of pork dangling in Chinatown restaurant windows? When you get char siu at a Cantonese restaurant, it will most likely be red from a little food dye, to attract customers. A small amount of dye isn't harmful (think of all those M&Ms and Skittles you've eaten). But sometimes a restaurant will go overboard. My mother still has nightmares of glowing magenta char siu from Boston's Chinatown.

The solution, if you want to avoid unnatural coloring altogether, is to make char siu at home. Char siu is often translated as Chinese barbecue pork, but these days hardly anyone skewers the pork and cooks it over an open fire. Rather, the name has stuck because the outside of char siu is blackened from roasting.

My method for making char siu is very easy, and still produces very succulent and drool-worthy meat. Rather than food coloring, you can get good color (not ghastly color) from a dark soy sauce, a little hoisin sauce, and honey. The key is marinating the meat for 2 to 3 hours to allow the flavors to seep in, and roasting the pork belly whole. Lean pork doesn't work as well, because the fat keeps the insides moist.

Making Hong Kong-Style Wonton Noodle Soup

dianakuan — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:05:09 +0000

Wonton noodle soup is one of the few dishes set very high standards for, almost to the point of obsession. Because of cravings for an ideal bowl of wonton noodle soup (and seeing my relatives), I have paid way too much for same day plane tickets to Hong Kong. When I get wontons that are all or mostly pork, I feel cheated. And I rarely visit wonton noodle stands outside of Hong Kong and Guangzhou, for fear of getting inferior versions.

Yes, it's rather compulsive behavior. But the behavior applies to any sort of a purist, whether the love is sushi, borscht, cocktails, or xiaolongbao. We all have certain foods we put on a pedestal.

If you can't get to Hong Kong, the next best cure for wonton lust is recreating the darn thing at home. After tinkering in the kitchen for over a year and a half, I have updated an older post on this very topic. For me, an ideal wonton noodle soup must include the following: fragrant broth consisting of pork and seafood umami flavor, springy al dente egg noodles, and wontons containing at least 50% shrimp.

Recipe: Twice-Cooked Pork (Huiguo Rou)

dianakuan — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:20:12 +0000

Contrary to myth, the Chinese don't have magically low cholesterol. But they do know that it's okay to eat pork belly every week in moderation, as long as you also get a healthy dose of greens, and maybe bike regularly to the grocery store in your clunky steel cruiser.

Not long ago I posted a recipe for Hunan red-braised pork, which many of you seemed to love. Twice-cooked pork is another dish I recently started making at home. Called huiguo rou (回锅肉) in Chinese, which literally means "meat returned to the wok", this is an extremely popular Sichuan dish that uses the same cut of meat, but this time with a predominantly spicy and salty characteristics.

The "twice-cooked" part refers to the pork belly first being simmered in salted water for an hour until fully cooked, sliced, then stir-fried in its own juices. A home-style dish at heart, the pork is then coated with a hearty sauce of fermented black bean, chili bean sauce and yellow rice wine, and mixed with vegetables like cabbage and bell peppers.

Recipe: Red-Cooked Pork (Hongshao Rou)

dianakuan — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:32:31 +0000

I remember a time when pork belly was shunned in the U.S. as a fatty, undesirable cut of meat. But thanks to a few big-name chefs, this unctuous piece of hog is gracing some of the country's most popular dining spots. David Chang's Berkshire pork belly in a bun may have been the most lusted-after dish in New York in the past 5 years.

Which is why I'm surprised red-braised pork is still not very popular outside of China. It's one of the least fiery dishes in the entirety of Hunan cuisine, and very easy to make at home. What omnivore can resist a dish of braised pork cooked with sugar, cinnamon, chilis, and star anise? The smells alone are intoxicating, and make me jittery with anticipation as I count down the minutes until braising is done.