Sunday Chinese
Last night was my first use of Land of Plenty. After flipping through most of the book there were a couple of recipes that were crying out to be made, but none were quite as loud as the twice-cooked pork. So that's what I started with.
It's a new recipe in a new cuisine, so I stuck as closely to it as I could. We couldn't find either wheaten bean paste or sweet bean paste at the Asian grocery, so I left that out. I couldn't find fresh pork belly, so I used salted pork belly instead and just soaked it for a couple of hours before preparing it. This worked fine and the pork was not overly salty. I also substituted small leeks for the baby leeks by stir frying them briefly first (as suggested in the recipe). I also poured out most of the fat before stir-frying the bean paste (I'm don't get particulalry worked up about fat consumption, but that was 1/4 cup of completely gratuitous fat). To compensate for the missing liquid and make the dish a bit more saucy, I added a couple spoons of chicken stock just before serving.
We ate the pork with short-grain (Japanese... it's what we have) rice. The dish was very good: intensely flavored, complex, and nicely textured (mmmm, crunchy pork skin).
As a side I cubed (1 cm dice) a kohlrabi [box] and stir fried that in peanut oil. Once the kohlrabi lost its uncooked taste I transferred it to a bowl and then toasted some sichuan peppercorns and a couple dried chilis in the oil. I poured the resulting oil over the kohlrabi to flavor it a bit more. This was (somewhat surprisingly, I must admit) a nice flavor combination.
We also had a shredded carrot salad (gotta finish the carrots!) that I seasoned with dark soy sauce, sesame oil, and chinkiang vinegar (dark Chinese vinegar). The vinegar is fascinating stuff and this was quite a nice salad.
5 comments:
oh, god. I love twice-cooked pork.
You are braver than I. I've never bought fresh pork belly.
You're gonna think I'm a shill for Sunset, but I've got their Wok cookbook (and several others as well). And it has a very good twice-cooked pork recipe. I use pork butt.
yours looks great. I haven't made twice-cooked pork in quite a while....mmmmm.
btw, isn't hoisin basically "sweet bean paste"??
Re: brave
Nah, the pork belly is just uncured slab bacon, so it's not that unusual. The tongue I did
back in January required more bravery on my part. :-)
Re: hoisin
According to Fuschia Dunlop, hoisin is "much sweeter" than the Sichuan sweet bean or sweet wheaten pastes/sauces. I didn't want to go overboard on sweetness, so I just left it out entirely.
oops, I forgot to respond to the Sunset part.
It's ok if you're a Sunset shill, when we were living in CA we lived a couple blocks from one of their headquarters buildings and they were good neighbors. :-)
Besides, I always end up relentlessly plugging the Schlesinger and Willoughby books to people, so the pot would be calling the kettle black.
re: tongue. It's a staple at my neighborhood grocery story. along with tripe. big hispanic community. I've not bought it because the wife would blanch at the thought. even though spiced tongue is good eats.
I find the various Sunset books to be quite useful. I use Raichlen's How to Grill and Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food "frequently" (that is, I pull them out for inspiration or technique on occasion). There was a time when I used the Frugal Gourmet's books a lot; now they mostly sit on the shelf. Instead, I draw more inspiration from jacques pepin's PBS shows (saturday mornings on KQED).
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