Adventures with Kake

Today's dish is a simple but delicious cold dish — beancurd with century egg (preserved duck egg). As I've explained previously, 皮 (pí/skin/leather/rind) in combination with 蛋 (dàn/egg) refers to duck eggs cured in a high-pH coating, leaving the whites "cooked" through to a translucent amber and the yolks dark green and creamy. I also discussed 豆腐 (dòu fu/beancurd) a while back.

皮蛋豆腐 is not complicated to make, but relies heavily on the quality of the ingredients. You want to use a fairly soft beancurd for this, and you want it to be as fresh as possible. Don't use the type that's marketed as a meat substitute (Cauldron brand, etc), as the texture is wrong, and also be careful about using aseptically-packaged brands, as many of them have a characteristic and (in my opinion) unpleasant flavour. Similarly, make sure that you like the taste of your century eggs on their own before using them in this dish.

Slice or cube the beancurd, then arrange it in a serving dish. Shell the century eggs, then halve, quarter, or chop them and arrange them on top of the beancurd.

The sauce for the dish is simply a mixture of soy sauce with sesame oil and/or Chinese black vinegar and/or a little chilli oil. You can garnish it with spring onions, either just the green parts or white and green together. I've also seen some recipes on the internet that add pork floss as a garnish, but I've never seen this in a restaurant (update, May 2011: I have now — at Leong's Legend, a Taiwanese restaurant in London Chinatown).

The dish I'm posting about today comes from Xinjiang, the region of northwest China that I posted about on Monday.

大盤雞 (dà pán jī) is a Xinjiang dish which translates literally as "a big plate of chicken". This is a pretty good name for it, really — a single order of 大盤雞 (pictured above) feeds at least four people. Some restaurants may offer a smaller portion, 中盤雞 (zhōng pán jī/middle-plate chicken).

I posted an example on Monday of a menu in Xinjiang written in Chinese, English, and Uighur. One of the dishes on this menu is in fact 大盤雞, the Uyghur version of which pne has kindly transcribed for me as داپه‌نجى (he also points out that this is just a transcription of the Chinese name).

I haven't managed to find a single authoritative-looking recipe for 大盤雞 (either in books or online), so please don't rely on the notes below being exactly accurate. The eGullet thread on big-plate chicken has some useful discussion, though.

I found two videos online showing 大盤雞 being prepared. The first was shot in a restaurant in Xinjiang. A whole chicken is cut into chunks on the bone with a cleaver, potatoes are peeled, leeks are prepared, and then various ingredients are shown in bowls, including the chicken, the sliced potatoes, sliced onions, chopped tomatoes, and chopped green chillies (I think). The chicken is initially fried along with a dark red paste from a tub which has a term on it that I can't quite make out, but it's four characters with the middle two being 油 and 豆. The stewing liquid added appears to be water.

The second video is one from 天天飲食, a daily cookery show from China Central Television. The ingredient list given is incomplete, but includes 三黃雞 (sān huáng jī/a type of chicken), 土豆 (tǔ dòu/potatoes), 青紅椒 (qīng hóng jiāo/green and red peppers), 麵粉 (miàn fěn/wheatflour), 朝天椒 (cháo tiān jiāo/"facing heaven" chillies), 乾線椒 (gān xiàn jiāo/some kind of chilli), 花椒粒 (huā jiāo lì/Sichuan peppercorns), 花椒麵 (huā jiāo miàn/ground Sichuan pepper), 紅油 (hóng yóu/chilli oil), 味精 (wèi jīng/MSG), and 鹽 (yán/salt). The chopped-up chicken is blanched in water, some sugar is caramelised, then whole peeled garlic cloves, sliced peeled ginger, and the white parts of spring onions are stirfried in oil. Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, and cassia/cinnamon bark are added and stirfried for a bit longer, then the chicken is returned to the pan along with the caramelised sugar, the two types of chillies, and some salt. Water is added, the chicken is simmered for a while, and then the sliced peeled potatoes are added. The chilli oil and red and green peppers go in later along with a brown powder and what I think is more garlic, chopped this time. The accompanying noodles are made from a simple flour/salt/water dough.

It's worth noting that when I tried making this according to the methods in these videos (and Sunflower's recipe mentioned below), my chicken ended up terribly overcooked. I may have over-fried it in the initial stages, but I do think next time I might give it some time out of the pan while the potatoes are cooking.

Given the large Muslim population in Xinjiang, I was initially confused by the inclusion of beer or Chinese wine in a number of the recipes for 大盤雞 I found online — for example Sunflower's 大盤雞, which uses beer for the stewing liquid. However, sashajwolf points out in comments that beer is not explicitly forbidden in Islam, and arguably neither is wine made from things other than grapes (and the type of Chinese wine used in traditional Chinese cooking is made from rice). pandarus adds in the same comment thread that it's actually intoxication which is forbidden.

The potatoes should be either sliced thickly or cut into chunks. The chicken should be cut into chunks still on the bone — just get the butcher to do this, unless you really love hacking carcasses about with a cleaver. (The chicken pieces should be small enough to be picked up with chopsticks, so you do want it chopped up, not just jointed.)

Garlic, onions, and fresh chillies are commonly mentioned in recipes. Some sources say that tomatoes or tomato purée should go in too, and possibly also some vinegar. Sugar appears in many recipes as well, with Yummy By Scratch even going so far as to caramelise the sugar first. Spices I've seen suggested include cinnamon, cassia, star anise, cumin, Sichuan peppercorns, and dried chillies; Sunflower also adds chilli bean paste (豆瓣醬/dòu bàn jiàng).

As mentioned above, if you're going to order 大盤雞 in a restaurant then you'll need at least four people to do it justice. One good way to eat the dish is to first eat all the chicken and potatoes, then to order some belt noodles (see Sunflower's recipe for how to make the noodles) which are placed in the remainder of the sauce to soak all up. Alternatively, you can soak up the sauce as you go along with the Xinjiang flatbread known as nan. This is similar to the Indian naan (it's leavened, and baked in a tandoor) but is circular rather than teardrop-shaped, and the centre is stamped flat before baking and often impressed with a decorative design (photo of stamped nan).

One particularly tasty type of Chinese mushroom is 茶樹菇 (chá shù gū), also known as tea tree mushroom or Agrocybe aegerita. I posted about 菇 (gū/mushroom) earlier this week, and have also previously posted about 茶 (chá/tea). 樹 (shù/tree) frequently appears on menus in the form of 螞蟻上樹 (mǎ yǐ shàng shù), or "ants climbing a tree".

Although tea tree mushrooms are available fresh in some parts of the world, I've only ever seen them dried in London (at New Loon Moon in Chinatown). The dried ones are still tasty, though the stems of the larger ones can be a bit hard even after soaking — one tip I've heard for using up the tougher stems is to pop them in a bag in the freezer and throw them in next time you make stock, for a bit of extra flavour.

茶樹菇 are good in soup, in stir-fried dishes, and in 火鍋 (huǒ guō/hotpot/steamboat) (photo of some prepared for hotpot). Pictured above is a rather good stirfry of 茶樹菇 and 臘肉 (là ròu/Chinese ham) that I ate at Chilli Cool in Bloomsbury and later tried to recreate at home.

I based my attempt on a recipe from Beijing Haochi, though I left out the greens as I was doing a separate leafy greens dish in the same meal. There was plenty of flavour from the mushrooms and ham alone, but I did also add a bit of Shaoxing wine and soy sauce.

I didn't use an expensive ham — I've tried finding Yunnan ham in London, but as yet have had no success, so I just used some cheap 臘肉 that I found at Loon Fung in Silvertown. If you feel adventurous, you could also try making your own!

As I mentioned on Wednesday, 粥 is the Chinese character for congee, or rice porridge, and one of the most popular styles of congee is congee with lean pork and preserved egg — 皮蛋瘦肉粥 (pí dàn shòu ròu zhǒu).

I discussed preserved egg (皮蛋/pí dàn) in my post on 蛋/dàn/egg last week. Otherwise known as "century eggs" or "thousand-year-old eggs", 皮蛋 can be something of an acquired taste; Fuchsia Dunlop suggests thinking of them as the Chinese equivalent of blue cheese (though I would say that fermented tofu/腐乳/fǔ rǔ is perhaps a better claimant to that title).

The basic idea of congee is simple; rice is cooked for a long time in a large quantity of water until it breaks down and forms a thick porridge. Possible flavourings include pork/chicken stock, soy sauce, meat, eggs, herbs, and so on. It's a savoury dish, often eaten for breakfast, and commonly found on old-school dim sum menus. It's also a very comforting thing to eat if you're ill (or hungover).

To make the congee shown above, I adapted Helen Yuet Ling Pang's congee recipe. I cooked 100g jasmine rice in 1 litre of vegetable stock along with a splash of soy sauce. After it had been simmering for around 45 minutes, I added two chopped 皮蛋 along with 100g pork which I'd earlier cut into 1cm pieces and marinaded with cornflour, soy sauce, black vinegar, and white pepper; that got another 15 minutes' cooking and then it was ready to eat.

(Purists will complain about my use of vegetable stock and soy sauce in the above. I'll admit that they made it harder to get a decent colour balance in the photograph!)

Here's the second of this week's two character posts (and some people may now be able to guess what Friday's post will be about).

餅 (bǐng) doesn't really have a precise equivalent in English. As far as I can tell, it basically refers to some kind of cake, pastry, or pancake. While it often implies that the item is disc-shaped, this isn't a cast-iron rule. Similarly, while in my experience 餅 as listed on menus are usually (a) savoury and (b) stuffed with some kind of filling, this isn't always the case.

Here are some dishes that use 餅 in the name. I'm using paragraphs here rather than my usual tabular format, to give me room to discuss their characteristics at greater length.

蘿蔔絲酥餅 (luó bo sī sū bǐng). These are often translated as something along the lines of "deep-fried shredded turnip puffs"; they're basically a puff pastry shell stuffed with shredded daikon/mooli. My post on 蘿蔔絲酥餅 has a photo, recipe links, and more info.

蔥油餅 (cōng yóu bǐng). While a common translation for these is "scallion pancakes" or "spring onion pancakes", this may be a little misleading for those familiar with Western pancakes/crepes. 蔥油餅 aren't made from a batter, but from a wheatflour dough; the chopped spring onions are layered into the dough by a process of rolling and coiling, before it's formed into a disc and fried in oil. Family Styles has a good recipe for 蔥油餅, including photos.

北京煎餅 (Běijīng jiān bǐng). This, on the other hand, is based on a very crepe-like kind of pancake, which is stuffed with egg, fresh coriander, spring onions, various sauces and flavourings, and a deep-fried wonton skin for crunch. I've never eaten one of these; it's a typical Beijing street food, and the only Beijing-style restaurant I know of in London closed down a few weeks before I got around to trying to go there. Quirky Beijing has an informative post on 北京煎餅, though.

炸墨魚餅 (zhà mò yú bǐng). These are deep-fried cuttlefish cakes; I don't have a photo of my own, but here's one I found on Flickr. This illustrates the "cake" meaning of 餅 — it's not cake as in sponge cake (you'd use 糕/gāo for that — see my post on 馬來糕/mǎ lái gāo).

百花腐皮餅 (bǎi huā fǔ pí bǐng). The literal translation of these is "hundred flowers beancurd skin cakes", while a more useful one might be "beancurd skin cakes stuffed with minced prawn". 百花 seems to be a fairly common way to refer to minced prawns — I've seen it on lots of dim sum menus. 腐皮 is actually made from soya milk rather than beancurd; it starts life as the skin which forms on top of warm soya milk when left to sit. I think a more common English term for it comes from the Japanese one, yuba. I'm not sure this is a particularly common way to use 餅, though, since the vast majority of the references on the web seem to be to the restaurant where I took this photo.

While some Chinese pork dishes, such as 紅燒肉 (hóng shāo ròu/red-cooked pork), require long cooking in a flavourful liquid to get the meat tender and tasty, others are based on the very straightforward procedure of simply boiling the pork in plain water. The result of this is 白肉 (bái ròu) — 白 means plain/white/pure, and 肉 is meat (remember, in the absence of a qualifier, this means pork).

This might not sound overly exciting, but it's actually not too dissimilar to the idea of Western cold cuts — plainly-cooked meat enlivened with some good, strong flavourings. Indeed, the particular dish I'm posting about today is a really tasty one that if done properly will leave you stinking of garlic for some time afterwards.

蒜泥白肉 (suàn ní bái ròu) is a cold dish (涼菜/liáng cài) of sliced pork slathered in a sauce based on mashed/minced garlic (蒜/suàn). There are many, many ways to make this sauce. Eating Club Vancouver has two versions of 蒜泥白肉, one of which grinds the garlic in the blender for a thicker, more homogeneous sauce. Soy sauce is a common ingredient; conversely, the version pictured above was flavoured very simply with chopped garlic in chilli oil.

The sauce I use is adapted from a book I found on Google Books (although it's bilingual inside, it doesn't appear to have an English title — the Chinese title is given as 培梅名菜精選: 川浙菜專輯). It's based on a sweetened soy sauce, which you can make by gently simmering 200ml soy sauce with 150g sugar, 4 Tbsp Shaoxing wine, 1 sliced spring onion, 1 slice of ginger, 1 piece of star anise, and a small piece of cinnamon bark, for 15 minutes. To make enough 蒜泥 sauce for 500g pork, mix 4 Tbsp sweetened soy sauce, 2 Tbsp garlic, 1 Tbsp chicken stock, and 2 Tbsp chilli oil (I use Sunflower's recipe for the chilli oil).

Pork belly is a good cut to use for this, or perhaps shoulder. You want a boneless chunk with the skin left on (and unscored) and a good layer of fat. Don't worry if your piece of pork looks a bit flat before you boil it. The skin will contract very quickly as it starts to cook, changing the aspect ratio — the piece I cooked earlier this week nearly doubled in height after boiling!

For a 500g slab of pork belly, you'll want to gently boil it for around 30-40 minutes in total. If you like, you can blanch, drain, and rinse the meat first and then save the boiling liquid to make stock with. This liquid won't be particularly strongly flavoured on its own, but would work fine in e.g. a soup where you might normally use water, or as the base liquid for a proper stock.

When the pork is cooked, leave it to cool and then slice it as thinly as possible before dressing it with the sauce. Getting nice thin slices is probably the hardest part — some people suggest that running the meat under the cold tap as soon as it's cooked will tighten it up and make this easier.

Just as there are many ways to make the sauce, there are also many ways to serve the final dish. One is to lay the pork slices out on a plate and drizzle the sauce over them. You could also toss the pork with the sauce and arrange it in an artful heap, as pictured above. More elaborate presentations involve rolling the pork slices around slivers of cucumber before topping with the sauce (photo), or draping both pork and cucumber over a wooden frame (photo, corroborating photo). Finally, some people prefer to have the sauce served on the side as a dipping sauce.

Incidentally, Joshua at Cooking The Books suggests another good thing to do with boiled pork belly — pork belly with black vinegar and ginger. I'm not sure what this would be in Chinese, but I'll be keeping an eye out for plausible candidates on menus. Joshua also points out the relevance of the short cooking time — the meat stays relatively firm, which not only helps you cut it into the thin slices required, but also gives a very nice texture when you eat it.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, steaming is a very common way of cooking fish in Chinese cuisines — a whole steamed fish can look pretty spectacular as the centrepiece of a banquet. However, the head is not left on simply because it looks good; there's plenty of flesh in there for eating, and in fact the cheeks are considered to be the most delicious part of the entire fish (I have no personal opinion on this, since I still haven't mastered the art of extracting flesh from cheek). Indeed, the restaurant (Golden Day) where I took the photo in this post actually offers steamed fish head (魚頭/yú tóu) as a dish in itself, and fish head dishes are popular in other Asian cuisines too (e.g. fish head curry in Malaysian cuisine).

In Cantonese (Guangdong) cuisine, a steamed fish might be flavoured quite simply and subtly with ginger and spring onions; this is the 清蒸 (qīng zhēng) or "clear steamed" style that Sung quite rightly berated me for not mentioning in my last post. Red Cook has a recipe for clear-steamed seabass (清蒸鱸魚/qīng zhēng lú yú) that exemplifies this technique (see also Ah Leung's comment on eGullet, Steamy Kitchen's Chinese steamed fish recipe, and Helen Yuet Ling Pang's post about her mother's steamed fish recipe).

Other regions have their own preferred styles too. Teochew-style steamed fish might be flavoured with sour plum, mushroom, tomato, and preserved vegetable as well as the usual ginger and spring onion — see Lily's Teochew-style steamed pomfret or Tepee's version on eGullet. I also recently read about a specialty of Yangzhou (a city in Jiangsu province, located on the bank of the Yangtze River) — steamed mandarin fish in vinegar sauce (though sadly I am yet to find a recipe for it).

For this post, though, I'm focusing on Hunan-style steamed fish, which is more likely to come with chopped salted chillies (剁椒/duò jiāo or 剁辣椒/duò là jiāo — 剁 is chopped/minced, 椒 is chilli/pepper, and 辣 is spicy) and perhaps a generous serving of minced garlic too. According to Henry Chung in his Hunan Style Chinese Cookbook, steaming is the second most popular way of cooking Hunan food (regrettably I seem to have failed to note down what he counts as the most popular).

Fuchsia Dunlop's book on Hunan cuisine, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, describes 剁辣椒 as a hot, sour, salty preserve which is "brilliantly, beautifully red in colour" and "one of the most distinctive Hunan seasonings". You can buy it ready-made in jars, but it's simple to make — coarsely chop some fresh red chillies (include the seeds too), mix them with salt, pack them into a clean jar, screw the lid on, and let them sit at room temperature for a couple of weeks. Ms Dunlop's suggested proportions are 500g chillies mixed with 60g salt, and another 15g salt sprinkled on top before sealing the jar (see the Tigers And Strawberries post on 剁椒 for volume measurements and additional commentary).

To steam your fish, you'll first need to make sure you have suitable equipment — specifically, something big enough to fit a whole fish in! The usual way to do this is in a wok — put a rack/stand in the bottom, add water, put the fish on a large plate on top of the rack, and put the domed lid of the wok on top of all that. If you don't have all those things, check out Helen Rennie's suggestions for an improvised fish steamer. Helen also gives timings: 8 minutes per inch of thickness for whole fish (measure the thickness at the thickest part).

The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook mentioned above offers a specific recipe for steamed fish with chopped salted chillies; I won't reproduce it here, but will give the gist. Before placing the fish in the steamer, make several diagonal slashes in the thickest part so the flavours can penetrate, then rub it with 1 Tbsp Shaoxing wine. Now stirfry 1/2 tsp fermented black beans and 1 1/2 tsp finely chopped ginger in 2 Tbsp oil, until fragrant; set aside and clean the wok ready for steaming. Place 20g unpeeled smashed ginger root and 1 smashed spring onion on the steaming plate, then put the fish on top. Cover the fish evenly with 60g chopped salted chillies, then scatter the black bean/ginger mixture on top. Steam until done.

Edit, October 2010: If you want a specific recipe to follow, TravelChinaGuide has one, though note that they don't specify that the chopped red chillies should be salted ones, and they omit the black beans.

Fittingly, the final dim sum dish I'm posting about this month is a dessert — 馬來糕, which is a steamed sponge cake. The pinyin is mǎ lái gāo, the Cantonese is ma lai goh, and the English translations I've seen include "sweet sponge cake", "Malaysian sponge cake", and simply "sponge cake". On dim sum menus, this sometimes appears in the steamed section and sometimes in the dessert section.

The literal translation of 馬來糕 is "Malaysian cake" — 馬來 (mǎ lái) is the "Malaysian" part, and as mentioned in my post on 蘿蔔糕/luó bo gāo/loh bak goh/radish cake, 糕 (gāo) refers to some kind of cake. I'm not really sure what the Malaysian connection is, but this is what it's called!

You may see different spellings — 馬拉糕 (mǎ lā gāo) seems to be quite common on the menus I've seen. I'm not sure whether this is best described as a spelling mistake or a spelling variant though. I've also seen it on menus as 牛油馬來糕 (niú yóu mǎ lái gāo), which I think refers to the use of butter as the fat in the cake (牛油 literally means "cow oil"). Another one I've seen is 吉士馬來糕 (jí shì mǎ lái gāo), which I have no idea of the meaning of Carolyn J Phillips tells me refers to the custard powder (吉士粉/jí shì fěn)^[1] that forms part of the recipe.

To make this at home, check out Sunflower's ma lai goh recipe. I must admit that I haven't quite got this recipe to work yet. The first time I tried it, I made the full recipe and it never set properly, even when I steamed it for half as long again as the recipe said to. The second time I made half-quantities, which worked better, though it could still have done with a little more steaming and it was nowhere near as light as the one pictured at the top of this post.

I had the one in the picture at Harbour City in London Chinatown, where it was listed on the menu as 牛油馬來糕 — perhaps the use of butter instead of oil had something to do with the lightness, though I would have thought this would affect the flavour more than the texture. Perhaps I simply didn't whisk mine enough.

Edit, June 2011: It's worth also checking out Carolyn J Phillips' 馬來糕 recipe.

I'm not normally a fan of pastry, but I'll make an exception for certain Chinese pastries, particularly these light, deep-fried puffs filled with shredded daikon. The Chinese name is 蘿蔔絲酥餅 (luó bo sī sū bǐng), though you might also see this abbreviated as 蘿蔔酥 (luó bo sū). 蘿蔔（luó bo) is daikon/mooli/Chinese radish (though as discussed before, the term also covers a few other root vegetables), 絲 (sī) means "shredded" (referring to the 蘿蔔), 酥 (sū) means "crispy" (referring to the pastry), and 餅 (bǐng) denotes a biscuit/cake sorta thing.

English translations I've seen for 蘿蔔絲酥餅 include "deep fried turnip puff pastry", "crispy turnip puff pastry", "shredded turnip puff pastry", "crispy shredded turnip", and, slightly bizarrely, "mooli croissant". They're sometimes available in vegetarian versions (for example at Shanghai Blues in London), but if they're not explicitly marked as vegetarian, there may be lard in the pastry and/or pork mince in the filling.

Like European puff pastry, the pastry used to make 蘿蔔絲酥餅 consists of multiple layers which separate and flake up on cooking. However, instead of the layers being separated by pats of butter, they're separated by a rich, lard-heavy dough — you essentially make two doughs, one including water and one not, and layer them up, then fold and reroll a number of times to increase the number of layers. Another difference is that the folding process aims to expose the edges of the dough layers, so when the pastries are cooked they make a pretty pattern as shown in the photograph above (which was taken at Gerrard's Corner in London Chinatown).

I looked at a few different recipes when making these: Sunflower's recipe, Lily Ng's recipe, and two Red Cook recipes for beet puffs and durian puffs. All of these make different quantities and use different amounts of flour, water, and fat — and Sunflower's recipe substitutes oil for part of the lard, while Lily's recipe adds an egg to the water pastry. I thought the best way to figure out what to do was to work out the ratios of the ingredients by weight, and compare these ratios between the recipes.

I eventually settled on a fat:flour:water ratio of 30g:100g:40g for the water pastry and a fat:flour ratio of 60g:100g for the lard cake — this fitted pretty closely to Sunflower's and Lily's recipes (which were given in weights), and also to one of the Red Cook recipes (the beet puff ratios were very different to the other three, and I do wonder if the use of volume measurements may have led to inaccuracies). I made one batch using all lard, and one batch using Sunflower's suggestion of replacing some of the lard with oil. The eventual flavour wasn't noticeably affected by the lesser quantity of lard.

Regarding methods, there seem to be two main options: either treat the pastry as a whole, and repeatedly fold and roll the two doughs together before cutting into pieces against the layers (Lily's recipe), or divide each dough into portions and combine them individually (the other three recipes). I tried both, using Lily's method with the all-lard dough and the other method (as described by Sunflower) with the lard-oil dough. I found that Lily's method was much less faff, but the other method produced better results for me, with the flaky strips more apparent. I don't know how much of this was down to the difference in dough composition and how much to the difference in method. (Edit, April 2011: here's an illustrated guide to different folding methods.)

Finally, there are also two options for cooking the things — bake them at 200°C (400°F) for around 20 minutes, or deep-fry them. I cooked half of each batch with each method. Unsurprisingly, the deep-fried ones were flakier while the baked ones were more solid. The all-lard baked ones ended up lighter in colour than the lard-plus-oil baked ones, but that might have been partly because they went in colder, due to the chilling of the dough. The all-lard fried ones were darker, denser, and less flaky than the lard-plus-oil fried ones, but that might have been partly or entirely because I fried them second and the oil was hotter and already had bits in (which can speed up browning).

The main mistake I made was in not putting enough filling in — I was worried that they'd come apart, but in the end only one or two of them leaked slightly. Next time I'll roll the pastry thinner and add more filling.

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.