Char Siu (Chinese Barbecue Pork)

It’s hard to pick a favourite Chinese BBQ meat, I love eating them all - roast pork belly “siu yuk”, roast duck “siu ngaap” and barbecue pork “char siu”. But when char siu is done right, it is particularly rewarding to eat. For me, great char siu requires an aromatic savoury, sticky sweet marinade, a nice amount of charredness, the meat should be succulent and not dry….and that red colour that shouts out eat me now! The colour red stimulates the appetite – note how red is the most prominent colour used in fast food logos.


I have to expose that the lovely red colour of char sui is totally artificial! My dad told me that because of the dark ingredients used in the marinade food colouring is added to intensify the colour of the pork and give the meat its characteristic hue - the Chinese associate red with good luck and fortune! 


Pork shoulder is generally used to make char sui but I prefer to use my favourite cut of pork – the belly. 


Ingredients
• ~500g pork belly (sliced in half lengthways – reduces thickness and more of the marinade can be absorbed)
• 4 cloves crushed garlic
• 1 teaspoon ginger, finely diced/grated
• 1 ½ peanut oil


Char Siu Marinade
• 1 ½ tablespoon maltose
• 1 ½ tablespoon honey
• 1 ½ tablespoon hoisin sauce
• 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
• ½ tablespoon dark soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon Chinese rose wine
• 10 white peppercorns, ground
• pinch of salt
• 1 piece of wet/fermented bean curd (red)
• ½ teaspoon five spice powder
• ½ teaspoon sesame oil
• For colouring – ½ teaspoon red powder + ¼ orange powder (optional)

Food colouring powder obtained from my dad’s restaurant. If only the red powder is used, the meat will turn out quite dark so a little bit of orange is used in the mix to lighten and even out the redness. The use of food colouring is optional but it wouldn’t seem like char sui without it.

Maltose sugar is hard and sticky, dip a spoon in hot water to scoop out. Maltose gives the pork a lacquered look and a sticky sweet taste and texture.

Recommended - Pearl River Bridge Brand of soy sauces

Chinese rice wine (Mei Kuei Lu Chiew) is very fragrant and provides a very nice flavour to the pork. It’s 54% alcohol! But it’s for cooking only and not to be drunk as a beverage.


Method
Add all char siu marinade sauce ingredients together into a saucepan, heat it up and stir well until all blended together. Transfer into a bowl to cool (around 20 minutes).

Marinade pork with 2/3 of the char siu sauce and the garlic and ginger. Cover and refrigerate for at least 8 hours or overnight, turning the pork a few times. 

Add 1 ½ tablespoon of peanut oil to remaining 1/3 char sui sauce and keep covered in refrigerator (this will be used to baste pork when roasting).


Preheat oven ~175C, roast the pork for 10 minutes then turn and baste in remaining marinade, roast for another 10 minutes and then turn and baste in remaining marinade again. Turn up oven to 200C and then roast for a further 15 minutes (turning up the heat at the final cooking stage provides charred texture to pork) 


Total roasting time = 35 minutes. Pork should have glazed red appearance and be slightly charred.

Remove pork from oven and let the pork rest for at least 10 minutes before slicing, to let the juices settle/dry.


Slice pork and serve with rice.

Notes
• Place aluminium foil sheet at the bottom of the oven for drips. If the remaining char sui marinade for basting is too tough when you take it out of the refrigerator, microwave it for 20 seconds to soften.
• Use the remaining char siu sauce to baste pork when roasting, if using char sui sauce which the pork has been marinated in to baste, simmer the marinade for 5-10 minutes to kill bacteria which may have been left by the raw meat.
• To make sure that the pork gets cooked through without too much charring on the surface, keep the heat down as the marinade contains high sugar content which burns fast.
• Baste at least twice to build up good layer of marinade on the pork for a crunchy/crispy, caramelised savoury and sugary outer coating to build up as it cooks. This also helps to keep the pork moist so that it doesn’t dry out during roasting.

Here are some of my other pork belly recipes:

• Vietnamese braised pork belly with eggs in coconut juice (Thit Heo Kho Trung)
• Twice cooked pork (Sichuan style)
• Braised pork spare ribs with pumpkin
• Roasted pork belly - sui yuk
• Kakuni (Japanese Braised Pork)
• Braised pork belly with daikon
• Communist Pork (Red Cooked Pork)
• Baki Kecap (Indonesian braised pork in sweet soy sauce)

Mango Pudding with Candied Lime Slices

The mango season runs from late September to mid April. It’s going to be over soon so I am going to eat as many mangoes and cook as many mango related things while I can still get them.


Mango pudding is a popular dim sum dessert. This sweet treat is a refreshing way to end the meal after devouring much steamed and fried dim sum dishes.


I made some mango pudding which had a soft creamy texture and was rich with mango flavour…none of this watered down business when you get mango essence or cubes of mango flavoured jelly. I used some ripe mangoes and also included a bit of orange and lemon juice to add some citrus notes to the pudding. Topped off with some candied lime slices.


Ingredients


• ½ cup ice cubes (~8 cubes)
• 5 gelatine sheets (soaked in cold water till softened and drained)
• ½ cup whipping cream
• ¼ cup sugar
• ½ cup evaporated milk
• 2 cups mango (~3 large, ripe mangoes)
• 2 tablespoon fresh orange juice
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• pinch of salt


Method


Peel, dice/coarsely chop mangoes and puree in blender until smooth.

Combine whipping cream and sugar in a small saucepan and bring to simmer, making sure that the sugar fully dissolves. Remove from heat and add gelatine sheets, and whisk together until the gelatine has completely dissolved.

In a large bowl, combine together mango puree, evaporated milk, ice cubes, orange juice, lemon juice and pinch of salt.

Whisk cream/gelatine mixture into mango puree mixture until fully combined and ice cubes have melted.

Pour into moulds and chill in refrigerator for at least 6 hours until it sets or overnight.

To serve, remove pudding from moulds by dipping the moulds into a bowl of hot water, and then upturn and unmould onto a plate. 


I added some candied limes slices on top of the mango puddings.

Candied Lime Slices


Ingredients


• 2 large limes or 3 small limes (can also use lemon or oranges)
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons sugar (for dusting)


Method


Slice limes into thin rounds, removing the seeds and discarding the ends (if you plan to halve or quarter the slices later, prepare them as full rounds or they will break down during cooking).


Blanch lime slices in a pot of boiling water for 2 minutes and drain (to remove any chemicals and wax).


Combine water and sugar in a saucepan, bring to simmer until the liquid is clear and bubbly.

Add in lime slices, making sure they don’t overlap (form one layer) and simmer for 20-30 minutes until the white pith of the limes look translucent (amount of time depends on how thick the slices are).


Take out the lime slices using a slotted spoon, drain and spread out on a cooling rack or arrange on greaseproof paper to cool and dry for ~ 1 hour.


Repeat the process, using the same syrup, cooking slices in layers until all slices are cooked.


Put 2 tablespoons of sugar unto a shallow bowl, when lime slices are dry, coat both sides by pressing into the sugar.

* Can refrigerate candied lime slices in an airtight container between layers of greaseproof paper for up to a month.

(Before)

(After)

Roast Duck and Lychee Salad

I own many cookbooks. I love to reading them to learn about techniques, the use of ingredients and understanding how to cook different dishes. I use cookbooks as a source of inspiration to plan what dishes I want to learn to cook and I just love flicking through them and looking at photos of food. But I find that I don’t really cook many recipes from them. I generally don’t follow one recipe. When I want to cook a particular dish I like to google some info or browse through a number of cookbooks and look at a couple of different recipes to see what the essential ingredients are and the general process of cooking the dish. I want to understand how the ingredients come together, their contribution to the taste, and be able to visualize to the process by understanding the basic procedure. This is more important that route learning a recipe. I find that I learn more about cooking this way.

The cookbook that I find myself cooking the most from is David Thompson’s Thai Food, if I am going to cook a Thai dish I figure that if I follow a David Thompson recipe there will be nothing else that can beat it. I will pretty much follow the recipe to a tee.

I found a roast duck and lychee salad recipe in Thai Food and during the summer months I like to eat lighter foods like salads so this was just what I needed with Perth’s never ending summer.

I have to admit that I am a bit weird about cooked fruit and using fruit in salads. I’m not really a big fan of apple pies or Christmas cakes/puddings due to the use of fruit in them. I love eating fresh fruit but I am a little bit conservative when it comes to fruit consumption in cooking. However, I am slowly coming around to it as I experiment a bit more with my cooking.

When I had a roast duck red curry at Nahm Thai on Bulwer Street in Northbridge it had lychee in it and tasted great. The combination of duck and lychee works well, duck seems to go well with fruit like the classic French dish ‘duck a l'orange’ and whenever I eat Chinese BBQ roast duck I love dipping it in some plum sauce. 


Roast Duck and Lychee Salad
(recipe from Thai Food by David Thompson)


Ingredients
• 200g (about a quarter of a roast duck), sliced
• 15 lychees, peeled and deseeded
• 3 spring onions, finely shredded 
• 1 tablespoon shredded ginger
• 2 cloves finely chopped garlic, fried
• handful of coriander, chopped
• 2 tablespoons roasted peanuts
• pinch of sesame seeds

(I bought half a roast duck from Hong Kong BBQ in Northbridge)

Dressing 

• 1 tablespoon plum sauce
• ~ ½ - 1 tablespoon palm sugar (to taste)
• 1 tablespoon Chinese black vinegar
• 3 tablespoons light soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons chicken stock or juices from duck

(When you buy roast duck from restaurants they always give out a little container of plum sauce)

First, make the dressing, it should taste salty, sweet and just a little sour. Combine all the remaining ingredients except the sesame seeds. Dress salad, sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

(fried garlic)

Thai Glass Noodle Salad with Spicy Mince Chicken and Prawns

(My verson of Yum Woon Sen)

Glass noodles (also known as cellophane noodles and bean thread noodles) are a type of transparent Asian noodle used in fillings for dumplings, spring rolls and other stuffed dishes, and they are also used in soups, stir fries and salads.


There is a popular Thai salad called ‘yum woon sen’ which uses glass noodles and is commonly mixed with some minced chicken or pork and prawns. It is served with a dressing made of fish sauce, lime and sugar.

Flicking through Neil Perry’s Balance and Harmony one day I came across a recipe for warm salad of spicy minced chicken. Perry describes it as a style of larp salad from the north of Thailand which is essentially a stir fry served on lettuce. A great meal to eat with a bowl of rice. 

I decided to use this spicy mince chicken recipe from Perry and adapt it to make a yum woon sen salad. I pretty much make this dish with some alterations to the ingredients (added in some black fungus) and method (added the garlic and chillies at the beginning of the stir fry rather than afterwards), and then incorporated in the glass noodles.  

(chopped up black fungus)

Glass noodles have a very mild flavour and absorbs sauces and flavourings well so I didn’t make a dressing for the salad as I didn't think that it was required. When I mixed the glass noodles with the spicy mince chicken, the glass noodles absorbed the flavours of the chicken mix including hints of the fish sauce and lime juice. I think that my version of yum woon sen has a milder flavour as I don’t douse it with a dressing but I liked the lightness of the flavour as it was quite refreshing.


Ingredients
• 10 cooked prawns, peeled and sliced in half widthways.
• ~80g bean thread noodles
• 2 tablespoons peanut oil
• 170g minced chicken
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped or crushed
• 3-4 small red chillies, seeded and finely chopped
• ½ red onion, finely sliced
• 50g green beans, trimmed and finely chopped
• ~ 1/3 cup black fungus (wood ear mushrooms), soaked in water until soft (30 minutes), then thinly sliced
• pinch sea salt
• pinch ground white pepper
• pinch caster sugar
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce
• 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
• 1 small handful of combined mint and coriander, chopped
• some baby cos lettuce leaves

Method
Soak the bean threads in a bowl of lukewarm water until they are soft (around 15-20 minutes). Drain. Cook the noodles in a pot of boiling water for approximately 3 minutes until the noodles are plump and glasslike. Drain in a colander, thoroughly rinsing with cold water.

Heat peanut oil in wok and add in the garlic, chillies, green beans, black fungus, red onion and chicken, and stir fry (make sure that you break up the chicken). When the chicken begins to turn white, add in a pinch of salt and pepper and continue to stir fry until the chicken is cooked (be careful not to overcook or the meat will toughen). 

When the chicken is cooked, remove from the heat and add in pinch of sugar, fish sauce, lime juice and herbs. Stir together, taste and adjust seasoning if necessary. 


Add the drained bean thread noodles into the wok and toss together with the chicken mixture. 

Put the cos lettuce leaves on a plate and spoon the mixture of bean thread noodles and spicy minced chicken on top. Add a few prawns onto the plate.