Adventures with Kake

Red-cooking (紅燒/hóng shāo) is a style of Chinese cooking often used for pork (肉/ròu). The red colour comes from a combination of caramelised sugar and soy sauce, and additional flavour is imparted by Shàoxīng wine and star anise. Optional extra ingredients include garlic, fresh ginger, and cassia or cinnamon bark. One of the most common cuts used is pork belly, cut into chunks but with the skin and fat retained to melt into a delicious tenderness as the meat braises.

I've seen 紅燒肉 on lots of Chinese menus here in London; the photo above is of a version I ate at Dragon Inn on the Old Kent Road. It's not hard to make at home, though. I have a couple of recipes to suggest, each with its own characteristics, and the background information at both links is also well worth reading. The first is an adaptation of a recipe by Fuchsia Dunlop, and the second is a recipe from the Red Cook blog (written by a Singapore-born blogger who likes red-cooked pork so much he named his blog after it). (Edit, June 2011: Kian at Red Cook has now posted a follow-up to his previous post which is also worth reading.)

I should add that I prefer to cook the pork for a lot longer than suggested in both these recipes — I find two-and-a-half to three hours is optimal, to get it really tender. Be careful when stirring it after the first couple of hours, as it has a tendency to fall apart by this point. Another important point is that it's well worth taking the time to blanch the meat before you start, to get out the impurities and make sure your sauce is nice and clear. Put your slab of pork belly in a pan with enough cold water to cover, then bring it up to the boil and let it simmer for a minute or two until the foam/scum has risen on top. Now drain the meat (discard the blanching water) and give it a wash under the tap to remove any remnants of scum. I find this is an easier and less wasteful alternative to skimming the scum off the sauce/stock while the dish is cooking, and I do it as a first step whenever I'm making a stock or sauce from meat or bones.

If you'd like to see 紅燒肉 being made, check out this YouTube demonstration, taken from a Chinese TV channel (all in Chinese, no English translation, but the visuals are easy enough to follow).

An interesting aside on all this is a blog post by Fuchsia Dunlop herself poking gentle fun at attempts to standardise the recipe for 紅燒肉. Also, for anyone wishing to delve further into the intricacies of red-cooking, this eGullet thread on the many meanings of 紅燒 might be of interest.

The basic unit of written Chinese is the character. Chinese characters are logograms; in other words, each character represents a specific concept (or set of concepts), rather than a specific sound (or set of sounds).

The advantage of this form of writing system is that the same characters can be used in different languages — for example, Mandarin and Cantonese both use 肉 to mean "meat"; however, in Mandarin it's pronounced roughly as "row" (as in rowing a boat) whereas in Cantonese it's pronounced roughly as "yuk".

This does raise the question of which of the Chinese languages is best to choose for a person learning to read Chinese menus! I've decided to learn the Mandarin pronunciations; this is partly because I live with doop, who already speaks some Mandarin, and partly because it doesn't actually matter all that much for my goal — if I end up in a restaurant where none of the staff can understand my Mandarin, I can always order by pointing at stuff on the menu. I did, however, want to learn a pronunciation, since it helps me make the characters stick in my brain when I can read them aloud as I'm learning them, and I may as well learn some real pronunciations as opposed to some made-up ones that only I understand.

Mandarin, like other Chinese languages, is a tonal language; this means that the meaning of what you say is affected by the pitch of your voice as well as the consonants and vowels you pronounce. This is a feature not present in any language I've ever previously learned, so it's something I'm paying special attention to.

Mandarin Chinese can be written not only with Chinese characters, but also in the Latin alphabet with the addition of accents to indicate the tones. The most common latinisation is called pinyin. Pinyin is kind of the opposite of characters, in that while characters carry information on meaning but not on pronunciation, pinyin is completely phonetic — if you know the pinyin for something, you know precisely how to pronounce it. However, you can't get the meaning from the pinyin; for example, 炸 and 榨 are both "zhà" in pinyin, but the former means "deep-fried" while the latter means "juiced" or "pressed".

I'll discuss pronunciation further as I go along in my Wednesday posts, but here are some YouTube video links for the interested:

• Mandarin Chinese Pinyin Pronunciation — covers consonants and vowels separately. Useful despite some audio encoding artefacts (4 mins 53 sec).
• China-8.com Chinese Lesson: Pinyin Tones — short, straightforward introduction to Mandarin tones (1 min 15 sec).
• Chinese sample lesson 1 - tones — tones again, longer than the above, and more entertaining (5 mins 14 sec).

Another decision I needed to make was whether to learn traditional or simplified characters. Wikipedia has an overview of character simplification, but in essence, simplified characters are quicker to write — for example, the traditional character for wheat noodles is 麵, while the simplified one is 面. In the end, it turned out that I would have to learn both — a quick survey of London menus revealed that some use traditional characters, others use simplified characters, and one or two use a mixture! However, it's generally considered easier for someone who can read traditional characters to learn the simplified forms than vice versa, so I decided to learn the traditional forms first.

I've covered quite a lot of ground in this post, but this is pretty much all the background knowledge you really need to get started. I'll look at the different aspects in greater detail in future posts. As always, I appreciate questions and corrections in comments.

I've just created a few new feeds, prompted by Follow Friday:

• hungry_tiger_feed — one of my favourite foodblogs, both for the recipes (all vegetarian) and for the tone in which it's written. I've been following it for years and still consider it one of the best.
• pubology_feed — this is ewan's pub blog and it is brilliant. He only posts once every couple of months, but the posts are well worth waiting for.
• rglondon_changes_feed — this is the feed of recent changes to the Randomness Guide to London. I help run RGL, so I won't shower it in praise here, but, you know, I do like it quite a lot.

Dreamwidth communities I've recently joined include gimp_gate (if you have any expertise with the GIMP, I have a question there still waiting for an answer!), style_system (I fiddled with my style! See, it is now very purple.), and language_learning.

Oh, and I also joined three_weeks_for_dw, because I will be starting a new series of posts on Monday, to form part of the festival. I am pretty much entirely uninterested in fanfic and fandom, so instead of complaining that there's too much of both on Dreamwidth, I'm going to post some non-fan content in the hope that someone else will be interested! I have probably dropped enough clues for you to guess what it will be about, but in any case all will be revealed shortly.