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General Category => Bacon, BBQ, Beef, And More => Topic started by: taschenrechner on April 20, 2017, 2148 UTC

Title: Hong Shao Rou (Chinese Red Braised Pork Belly)
Post by: taschenrechner on April 20, 2017, 2148 UTC
This is a dish famous for being Mao Zedong's favorite. My wife is also from Xiangtan, Hunan, Mao's hometown, and thus my mother in law makes a mean hongshao rou herself. This is how she makes it.

Ingredients:

1-2 lbs. pork belly (with or without skin. She leaves the skin on and it's amazing, so if you ask my preference, that's it.)

2 tbsp. peanut oil

2 tbsp. white sugar

Shaoxing wine (this can be found in any Asian market - it's a type of rice wine for cooking)

A thumb sized piece of ginger, sliced up.

1 star anise

Dried red chili peppers (I usually use 3, but you can add as many as you like. Hunanese folks are like Chinese Cajuns and they love hot stuff)

A stick of cinnamon

Soy sauce

Green onions /spring onions


Ok, here goes:

Boil some water in a big pot. Put the pork belly in and let it do it's thing for 4 minutes or so.

Take it out and let it drain and cool down. You can then slice it up into bite size pieces, but remember to slice it to where there is a nice proportion of meat, fat, and skin on each piece.

Take a large pot (I use a cast iron dutch oven, which is perfect for this) and heat the peanut oil and the sugar. Stir it and let the sugar caramelize. Don't let it burn. Burnt sugar taste will ruin your meal big time.

Once it's brown though, add a couple generous splashes of shaoxing wine and stir a couple times.

Throw in the pork, star anise, cinnamon, ginger, and chile peppers. Add enough water to just cover the pork. Turn the heat up and let it boil. Once it boils, bring the heat back down to low and cover it and let it simmer for 45 minutes or so.

Check it occasionally. You don't want the water to run out.

After about 45 minutes you can check and adjust the taste with soy sauce and sugar. Turn the heat up to reduce the liquid further. You want it to almost be like a sticky bbq sauce, but just a little runny.

At that point it's done and you can cut up some of the green onions to sprinkle on top.

If I can find the time, I will translate more of her recipes. She left us a huge stack of handwritten cards on one of her visits.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G891A using Tapatalk
Title: Re: Hong Shao Rou (Chinese Red Braised Pork Belly)
Post by: Pigmeat on April 28, 2017, 0232 UTC
I used to share a trailer with a couple of Thai's in college, people in that part of the world love their pork belly. One of the guys was ethnic Chinese, but there that means his family could have arrived in what's now Thailand any time in the past several hundred years.

They and their friends all worked cooks and waiters at local Chinese restaurants. When those guys got off at night we ate like kings.
Title: Re: Hong Shao Rou (Chinese Red Braised Pork Belly)
Post by: taschenrechner on April 28, 2017, 1145 UTC
Oh yeah. I used to teach English to a 2nd grader whose parents had just moved to the US from Fujian province to run a restaurant. Being a small town, they cooked all the standard American Chinese fare for the restaurant, but whenever I'd drop him off in the back of the restaurant, I would always be greeted with a big plate of whatever they themselves were having that day. Roast duck, pork belly, steamed fish, whatever it was. And it was all great. When you work that hard, I guess you tend to make the most out of what little time you have for yourself.