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.
[Read more…] about Chairman Mao’s Red-Cooked Pork Belly Recipe (Hong Shao Rou)