Chinese Recipes | Cooking Tips | Good Eats

When I go to Ranch 99, I will buy some Roast Duck and sometimes if I am lazy to make my own Char Siew (BBQ Pork), I buy some there too, to make Yang Zhou Chow Fun.

The other item I find goes well with Char Siew is Roast Pork (烧肉). Unfortunately, the Roast Pork at Ranch 99 has skin that is too hard.

Recently, PabloPabla posted his Chinese Roast Pork recipe and I got tempted to make some too, although I did not have course salt (or sea salt) or red fermented bean curd, as in Babe In The City’s Roast Pork recipe.

Being in the experimental mood, I thought: “Heck with those 2 ingredients! Let’s see the result without them!”

The end result was good. I am sure the red fermented bean curd would have made this dish more authentic, but I can’t think of any other dish I can use the red fermented bean curd for, so I was not willing to “invest” in a bottle. :) If you know of other dishes I can cook with that, please do let me know!

Ingredients (Serves 2):

- 1/2 lb roast pork belly
- 1 tbsp salt (I only had fine salt)
- 1 tbsp five spice powder (or enough to coat the pork belly)

Method:

1. Rub pork belly meat and fats with salt and five spice powder.

2. Rub pork belly skin with a layer of salt.

3. Allow to marinate for at least 30 mins.

4. Preheat oven to 450F and bake marinated pork belly (skin side up) for about 20 mins.

5. Remove from oven, allow pork belly to rest for about 5 mins. Scrape off the layer of crystalized salt on the skin surface, then using a fork, prick all over the surface of the pork belly skin. This is to allow the oil to ooze out and bubble, creating that familiar Roast Pork look and texture.

6. Place pork belly (skin side up) back to the oven and continue to roast at 450F for another 20-30 mins.

7. When skin is nice and crispy, remove from oven, allow to rest for 10 mins then cut the pork into bite sized pieces and serve.

Cook’s notes:

1. Five spice powder have a very strong smell, so if used excessively, the smell may be too overpowering for some people, so just use enough to coat the pork belly meat and fats.

2. A friend told me there exists a specific instrument used for pricking the pork belly skin. It’s like a block of something with very sharp spikes. I didn’t have that, so using a hardy fork worked for me as well, just that I had to do more poking into the pork belly skin.

3. When the pork belly skin is “bubbling”, there will be oil splatter on the sides and door of the oven, so do not panic when that happens. Just be prepared for some cleaning up after that!

Roast Pork - goes well with rice and instant noodles and for leftovers, I added them to my Fried Hokkien Prawn Mee (stay tuned!)

I have been busy lately, planning for the arrival of my little one. There are so many things to buy! Will I still have money left to buy food?!? (I mean … how can a crib cost USD200-300 and why should a crib bedding set cost more than USD100!?!?!)

Also recently, because of my broken right wrist my right wrist is still hurting, I have been making the simplest of dishes. My sincere thanks to my readers who have asked about my wrist. Unfortunately it still hurts :(

Well, but my home-made char siew turned out OK :)

All thanks to Lee Kum Kee Char Siew Sauce, I had very little work to do. I just needed to marinate the pork for a good 4 hours (or overnight), half-cook it over a pan (a trick mom taught me), then broil it over the oven. What’s good about this home-made char siew is that I get to have some sauce to drizzle over my char siew.

Ingredients (Serves 2-3):

- 1 lb pork belly, skin removed
- 3-4 tbsp Lee Kum Kee Char Siew Sauce

Method:

1. Marinate pork belly in Lee Kum Kee Char Siew Sauce for 4 hours or overnight.

2. Heat up 1-2 tbsp oil in a saucepan. Medium heat. When oil is hot enough, transfer marinated pork to saucepan. Set aside the excess marinate liquid to make a sauce later.

3. Cover saucepan and cook for 5 minutes. Mom says this gets rid of the pork smell. I say ok.

4. At this time, the oil from the pork belly may start to ooze out. Uncover saucepan and continue to cook for a while more. Then add a bit of water to the saucepan. This is to prevent the Lee Kum Kee Char Siew Sauce from caramelizing too quickly and burning, cos if that happens, then there is no gravy.

5. Turn pork belly to the other side and cook for 10 more minutes. Whenever the saucepan looks like it’s drying out, add a bit more water, but not too much, because you don’t want to be braising the pork.

6. After 10 minutes, transfer the half-cooked pork to the oven preheated to 450F and allow to cook for about 30 mins. For the last 10 mins, set the oven to broil (meaning heat on the upper half of the oven only).

7. While the pork is roasting in the oven, pour the excess marinate into the same saucepan and add some water to dilute the marinate. Cook the excess marinate by allowing it to come to a boil, then turn off the stove and allow the cooked sauce to cool.

8. When pork is done, allow it to rest (and redistribute its juices) for about 5-10 mins, then slice and drizzle cooked char siew sauce over it.

Cook’s Notes:

1. If keeping excess char siew for next day’s meal, set aside sauce in a different bowl. Drizzle sauce over char siew only after char siew has been reheated in the oven, so that the sauce does not dry out in the oven during the reheating process.

2. If you have a cucumber, you can also cut some out and drizzle the char siew sauce over it.

Back in Singapore when I was working 16-hour days, eating was more of a “need” than a “want”, and cooking was almost a “never”.

During lunch time, I would go to the food court and choose the stall with the shortest queue, never mind that that is not my favorite stall. I just need to eat and get back to work.

One of the stalls in China Square Food Court sells mixed vegetables and meat dishes with rice or porridge. In Teochew/Hokkien dialect, we say that the stall sells “Chap Chai Png”. (”Chap Chai” means mixed vegetables and “Png” refers to rice.)

Stir Fried Pork and Szechuan Vegetable was one of the items that I would choose.

For those of you who do not know what is Szechuan Vegetable, it’s found in the refrigerated section of the Asian Supermarket and it looks like a dirty green brain. When cooked, it takes on a light tinge of orange.

Szechuan Vegetable is a type of pickled mustard stem, salted, pressed, and dried before being rubbed with hot chile paste and allowed to ferment in an earthenware jar. The taste is a combination of spicy, sour, and salty.

Easy Chinese Recipe for Stir Fried Pork and Szechuan Vegetable:

Ingredients (Serves 1-2):

- 1/4 lb pork, preferably with a little fat, cut into thin strips or slices
- 1 pc of szechuan vegetable, about size of a medium egg, washed thoroughly and cut into thin strips
- 1/2 tsp minced garlic
- 1/2 tsp dark soy sauce (for coloring purposes)
- 2 tbsp water

Seasoning for pork:

- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp white pepper
- 1/2 tsp corn starch

Cooking Method:

1. Season pork with salt, pepper and corn starch.

2. Heat up 1-2 tbsp vegetable oil in pan. Medium heat. When oil is hot enough, add garlic and stir fry until fragrant.

3. Add Pork and Szechuan Vegetable and stir fry until pork is lightly browned. Add dark soy sauce and mix well. Add water if you find the dish a bit dry.

4. Serve with plain white rice or porridge (rice congee).

Stir Fried Pork and Szechuan Vegetable - easy enough for you?

Feast your eyes on the picture: It is tender, succulent and melts in your mouth… … Now, close your eyes and spend a moment to visualize yourself chowing down on a steaming hot Stewed Pork Belly Bun. The juice oozes out of the stewed pork as you chew s-l-o-w-l-y, biting into the meat and the fats, tasting every bit of it.

Stewed Pork Belly Bun is also known in dialect as “Kong Ba Bao”. It is basically stewed pork belly in dark soy sauce wrapped in plain “bao skin” (see picture below). In Mandarin, “bao skin” is called “man tou”.

I kind of mutated PabloPabla’s recipe to make my “Kong Ba Bao”. Here is the mutated (but still excellent!) recipe:

Ingredients (serves 4):
- 1.3 lb (about 600g) pork belly
- 4 tbsp brown or white sugar
- 1 whole bulb garlic, separate into individual cloves
- warm water
- 2 sticks cinnamon, 3 star anise, 3 cloves and 2 cardamon seeds

Seasoning
- 3 to 4 tablespoons dark soya sauce
- 1/2 teaspoon of salt

Cooking Method:
(Steps 1 & 2: Lock, stock and barrel from PabloPabla)

1. Add sugar into a wok / saucepan which has been heated up. Let the sugar caramelise (turn liquid and brown).

2. Once sugar fully caramelised, add the whole pork belly and let it “sear” for 1 minute on each side. Add water to cover the pork belly by 1 to 2 cm. Add the rest of the ingredients and seasoning. Once water begins to boil, reduce to medium low heat.

This is the difference I made:

3. Cover lid and let it simmer for two hours.

4. For the pork belly to look brown all over, cut the pork belly into inch-thick slices, put them back to the gravy to simmer for another 10 minutes. Then lay them out on an oven tray with some gravy and place them into an oven pre-heated to 450 degree F, for 10 minutes.

5. After 10 minutes, set the oven to broil and let the pork belly crisp up a bit for another 5-10 minutes. See how the pork belly has browned in the picture below.

6. While the pork belly is broiling in the oven, steam the “bao skin” (man tou).

7. To serve, shred the pork into bite sized pieces. You may choose to remove some of the fats at this stage. Then insert the pork and skin into the “bao skin”.

Note: There was too much gravy in this recipe for “Kong Ba Bao”, so what I would do next time is to first cut the pork belly into inch thick slices, then sear the pieces on the caramelised sugar. To get a thicker gravy, I would use less water because the pork skin has a gelatinous effect and would make the gravy sticky.

How is this for a sinfully delicious stewed pork belly in dark soy sauce wrapped in “bao skin” to become “Kong Ba Bao”! End the meal with a cup of hot Chinese tea heh!

Uh-oh. This is what happens when I did not apportion food for just one serving. One quarter pound of minced pork is too much for a one person serving. But because one quarter pound was frozen and then defrosted as one packet, I had to cook the whole packet anyway. I shall use one eighth pound next time!

This is a simple dish that goes well with rice congee (porridge).

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