Tag Archives: chinese food

Cooking

Cha Siu

I go out of my way in Chinatown to buy cha siu because it was a dish that I never dreamt of cooking. However, when I bought a pork shoulder on a whim and subsequently frantically looked up ways to cook it Chinese-style, cha siu came up. I didn’t even realize that was the cut used! Next time, I will be sure to buy the fattiest cut available.

Shoutouts to thewoksoflife.com, with consistently good Chinese and Taiwanese recipes, and invaluable advice on how to emulate industrial cooking equipment in the home kitchen.

 

Cha Siu (Cantonese BBQ Pork)

sliced: lean cut. back: fatty cut.
  • 3 lb pork shoulder/butt, very fatty, cut obliquely into flat 1”-thick strips. Marinate in bag overnight.
  • Barbecue sauce: 2 tbsp sugar, 1 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp five spice, 1 tsp paprika, 1/4 tsp white pepper, 1 tbsp plum wine (or rice wine), 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1/2 tsp sesame oil, 2 tsp hoisin sauce, 2 tsp tomato paste, 2 tsp molasses (or 3 tsp honey), 1 tbsp oil, 3 cloves garlic minced, 1 tbsp hot water.
  • Prepare baking tray, lined with foil, with wire rack atop. Place pork on top, reserving marinade for basting.
  • Roast in upper rack of oven at 475+ F for 25 min. Flip, brush with sauce (important), then roast for 25 min more. Rest for 5 min.
Cooking

Dumplings

Happy New Year! Woo, roosters!

Appropriately, we made chicken cabbage dumplings. Also, pork and chive potstickers. Flashback to my Harvard Taiwanese Cultural Society days and our Dumpling Workshops, where we would buy huge bags pork and other ingredients, mix it with our hands, teach 100+ people how to wrap 1000+ dumplings, boil in three vats of water, and just have a great big happy family.

170128-5666
left bowl experimenting with alternate wrapping shapes
  • combine 1 lb ground meat, like 1oz chives, tiny bit of minced ginger and scallions, a splash of soy sauce, some cooking wine, dash of sesame oil.
  • with friends, wrap around 40 dumplings.
  • in a big wok with some oil, steam off a thin layer of water, then fry two surfaces.

Sorry, there’s no way to write an intelligible terse recipe, haha