Reading Chinese Menus: Dishes: 燒肉 — shāo ròu — siu yuk — crispy roast pork belly

[kake]

This photo is a CC-licensed derivative work of a photo by cshan.

Next in my dim sum series — crispy roast pork belly. Although strictly speaking this is not a dim sum dish, it's been part of so many of my dim sum lunches that I sort of had to include it. Like dim sum, it's (as far as I know) a Cantonese speciality, and (at least in London) is often available at restaurants offering dim sum.

I've seen a number of transliterations for this — siu yuk, siu youk, siew yoke. The Chinese characters are 燒肉 (shāo ròu in Mandarin), which simply means "roast meat" — remember, the default meat in most Chinese cuisines is pork, so wherever you see 肉 without further qualification, it almost certainly means pork. Don't confuse 燒肉 with 紅燒肉/hóng shāo ròu! It's completely different.

On a menu, this might also appear as 脆皮燒肉 (cuì pí shāo ròu) — the 脆皮 part means "crispy skin". This makes a lot of sense, since perhaps the most important aspect of siu yuk is the crispy, savoury crackling. If you're making this at home, you really do need to make sure that the skin of the pork is cooked thoroughly all the way through to the meat, or your crackling will be chewy. I can personally recommend Charmaine Mok's method for this, which involves actually letting the crackling go far enough to burn, and then scraping off the charred parts with a serrated knife. It's also worth checking out Sunflower's hints on choosing the best piece of meat for the job.

When I made this, I used Charmaine's recipe and it worked out pretty well (though note that I think the 45 minutes cooking time is meant to be 45 minutes total, not 20 minutes in the oven plus 45 minutes under the grill — I took mine out in time to avoid the house filling with black smoke).

There's also extensive discussion on the eGullet thread about making 燒肉, including an interesting experiment on the best way to treat the skin to get a good crackling — the surprise winner was vodka. I haven't tried this yet, but I certainly will next time.

Related posts:

• Dim sum wrap-up,
• 紅燒肉 (hóng shāo ròu/red-cooked pork),
• 蒜泥白肉 (suàn ní bái ròu/pork with mashed garlic),
• 皮 (pí/skin/leather/rind),
• 肉 (ròu/meat)

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.

Comments

[eatlovenoodles.blogspot.com]

One of my favourites! Roast meats are an essential accompaniment to dim sum! Although not strictly dim sum, you often see siu yuk on dim sum 'ticksheets' in HK and Singapore. In fact the portion size is like the one in your stunning photo - where's was it taken?

[kake]

I had to bring this post forward in my schedule, so didn't have my own photo yet... so I made a CC derivative based on this photo by Flickr user cshan. It appears that the original photo was in fact taken in Hong Kong! I'll edit the post to make it clear that I didn't take the actual photo.