Since I had to buy a sizable piece of pork belly for the Japanese braised cha shu, I went hog wild and cooked pork belly Chinese style. If you noticed in the Japanese pork belly recipe, it’s simmered in a classic Chinese method called red cooking in which soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar are combined to flavor and color the meat a deep mahogany. The Japanese borrowed the Chinese simmering technique but for some reason called it cha shu, though they never roasted the pork. Go figure. Chinese red cooking produced remarkably rich meat that doesn’t taste fatty. You end up gobbling pork belly but don’t mind it. Actually you want to eat more of it. Chinese red-cooked pork belly is perfect for slicing and stuffing into steamed rolls, just like its Japanese counterpart. Or, just have it with rice for a sumptuous meal.
When I set out to prepare red-cooked pork belly, I looked in a number of my favorite Chinese cookbooks and settled upon Fuchsia Dunlop’s recipe in Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, which focuses on Hunan cooking. Fuchsia relates how red-cooked pork in Hunan is practically unseparable from Chairman Mao Zedong, who loved it, ate lots of it, and requested it from his personal chefs in Beijing. The folks from Shaoshan village where Mao was from even declared red-cooked pork to be a health food that also kept your mind sharp. I suppose that in times of hunger, which China had plenty of in its past, a chunk of well flavored fatty pork would be both luxurious and nutritious.
Fuchsia presents Chairman Mao’s red cooked pork recipe (she calls it red-braised) and there’s a nifty technique quite similar to traditional Vietnamese kho, savory dishes simmered in caramel sauce. She caramelizes sugar and oil before simmering the meat. Other Chinese red-cooked pork recipes I’ve seen calls for rock sugar and dark soy sauce but Mao’s approach allows you to skip the trip to an Asian market. Actually, go there for excellent pork belly, rice wine, and soy sauce.
I spent years studying modern Chinese history and Mao was a controversial subject to say the least. If things just boiled down to this recipe, there would be no controversy. Just pure porky bliss.
RECIPE
Chairman Mao’s Red-Cooked Pork Belly
Mao Shi Hong Shao Rou
Buy lean pork belly – it’s usually more expensive than the fattier cut. If you like, remove the skin but I enjoy it for textural contrast and it enriches the sauce. This dish keeps for days in the refrigerator and freezes well too. The recipe below was adapted from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook by Fuchsia Dunlop (W. W. Norton 2007).
Serves 4 to 6
1 pound pork belly, lean cut preferred
2 tablespoons peanut or canola oil
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
Water
Chubby 3/4 inch piece fresh ginger, unpeeled and sliced
1 star anise (count 8 robust points)
2 dried red chiles, such as arbol
2-inch piece cassia bark or cinnamon stick
3 scallions, white and green parts, cut into 2-inch lengths
Light (regular) soy sauce
Salt
1. Bring a 3 or 4-quart saucepan of water to a boil and parboil the pork belly for 3 to 4 minutes. Transfer the pork to a plate and allow to cool. Discard the cooking liquid. When cool enough to handle, cut into bite-size chunks.
2. Put the oil and sugar into the saucepan that you just used and heat over medium heat. When the sugar melts, increase the heat and stir until the sugar caramelizes to a rich brown.
3. Lower the heat slightly, add the pork, and splash in the rice wine. Add water to just cover the pork. Scatter in the ginger, star anise, chiles, cassia and two-thirds of the scallion.
4. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer, covered, for about 45 minutes, until you can easily pierce a chopstick into a chunk of pork. There should still be some resistance. The pork should have become a mahogany color.
5. Uncover, increase the heat to vigorously simmer and reduce the sauce to roughly half its volume. Taste and season with the soy sauce, salt, and sugar. Aim for a savory, faintly sweet flavor. The pork may be cooked up to this point, cooled and refrigerated or frozen.
6. To serve, reheat the pork, taste and adjust the flavor as needed. Transfer to a bowl, leaving behind the aromatics, if you like. Garnish with the remaining scallion and serve with rice. If using for steamed buns, slice the pork at room temperature and reheat in the steamer as directed in the Japanese braised pork belly buns recipe.
As soon as I saw the title, I thought of Fuchsia Dunlop’s book – this recipe looks tremendous – its been on the back burner for me to make. Unfortunately, we’re in the process of moving and all my cooking equipment is in boxes around me. Ah, so close, yet so far away.
Oh.. this dish is simply called Babi Hong (babi=pork hong=red) by the Chinese ethnic in Indonesia. I love pork belly. If the meat is less expensive, I would cook all sorts of dishes with pork belly every week 🙂
Oyster Culture — you’ve got all winter to make pork belly after unpacking. It’s a nice little dish, and the cool thing is that once made, you can freeze chunks of it to eat over a long period of time.
Tuty — thanks for the Indonesian take. Greatly appreciate it.
This is probably a really dumb question, but: when you say you like to leave the skin on for texture … does that mean that you can eat the skin?
@Krista: Yes, you can eat pork skin, and it’s delicious. When I buy pork belly, I usually cut it into strips and gently pan-fry it in its own fat until crispy. The Momofuku cookbook has complicated instructions for making your own chicharones, or fried pork rinds – yes, like the ones you can buy at the grocery store. He says to take all the fat off before you fry them, but the ones I get locally in San Antonio, TX, always have a bit of fat left on them, which I’m sure reduces shelf life but increases deliciousness.
@Thebarkingdog — Thanks for responding to @Krista. Indeed, eat the skin. It provides texture to the sauce as there’s collagen in the skin. Additionally, the skin offers textural contrast to the fat and the meat. A double whammy!
I made this last night – it was great! Thanks for the recipe. I think letting it brown slightly at step three before adding the water would have been a nice addition, but either way it is a great dish, skin and all!
@Thebarkingdog Where do you buy pork bellies in San Antonio? Bolner’s said they have them frozen. Anywhere else have them fresh?
Made this tonight, but I think I used far too much water and the flavor wasn’t too strong and they didn’t really turn a nice mahogany. The pork was nicely cooked though…next time
Tomorrow is December already! Can you believe it? In Japanese, December is called “SHIWASU,” which means “monks running around.” This word aptly describes the busiest month of the year in Japan. Why is December so busy?
The food looks delicious but I couldn’t eat it with chopsticks for sure. I never can.
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I actually made a meal very like this, I called it Chairman Andy’s Special Pork which is an interesting coincidence! I was working/living at a restaurant in France at the time, and one thing we always had quite a lot of was our Pork belly, which we slow roasted with garlic and salt, frequently drizzling the dripping over the top, and then we pressed it between two roasting trays using a box of wine.
When it had cooled, I would dry roast a bit of coriander, then heat some oil, throw in a few lime leaves, Thai fish sauce, and some garlic shallots and mushrooms. I would also throw in a few diced chilies to taste.
Next add the pork and a little bit of honey and white wine or rice wine vinegar, along with some thick soy sauce (I used a dutch brand called Katjap Manis, but I find that healthy boy brand is very good too).
Throw in another few lime leaves and a good handful of chopped fresh coriander,
Next boil the kettle. While that’s going quickly whisk some eggs with some powdered ginger, turmeric and a little chili, then I would throw the eggs into another pan, and try to spread it as thinly as possible.
Next pour the boiling water into some couscous slowly until it had plumped up properly, fluff it up with a fork, When the egg has been cooked for what would seem to a European to be way too long, give it a dash of fish sauce, and scrape it off the bottom of the pan with a spatula and add the couscous with a bit of thick soy.
give this a quick stir, and then serve up in a bowl with the pork and veg.