梅菜扣肉 – Preserved Mustard Veggies w/ so delicious pork!

This is one of my favourite-est dishes in the world. and the last time i ate this was maybe 6 years ago. I used to only eat the version my grandma cooked, and ever since she started getting sick and past away, i have not eaten a good version of this dish ever since.

I wanted to cook it the way she used to cook it, cause that's the one i know best. Her's did not involve steaming or cooking the pork and veggies separately. Hers with all together in one pot with loads of yummy salty sauce to go with rice or porridge. So i get out to replicate what she made. and i am so so so so so happy to say that i have done it! with great success. She will be so very proud.

This is a time consuming dish. but it is totally worth it. the 3 of us ate it for dinner for 3 straight nights.

  
Ingredients

1. 500g mei cai (you can use a mixture of sweet and salty or just salty – as you can see, i used 3/4 salty and 1/4 sweet)
2. 6 pieces of pork belly – i'm not sure of the weight though. but a good amount of meat
3. Light soy sauce
4. Dark soy sauce
5. 6 cloves or more garlic, crushed
7. A tiny star anise
8. Water

Directions

You have to wash your mei cai really well. The sweet one doesn't really need soaking but the salty one needs. So after washing, soak the salty mei cai for 3 hours, changing the water every hour.

While doing that, you can start to prepare the pork. I don't like hair on my food, so i pick all the hair out of the pig skin. then give it a good wash.

Boil a pot of water, and place the pork belly in. This cooks and gets rid of 'dirty' things on the pork, like excess blood etc..

Taking a few tablespoons of light soy sauce, sorta marinate the pork belly pieces in it, just for a few minutes. This gives it colour and fragrance when we fry it later.

In a wok, place a little oil and fry the pork belly till all sides are nice and brown. Some sides are more difficult to fry, so don't kill yourself if you can't get all the sides. The hot oil stings!

Place the pork, still hot, into ice cold water. and leave it there for as long as you can. This step is what gives you a wonderfully bouncy and melt in your mouth fats. You can leave the pork in here until your mei cai gets enough soaking time.

Then, slice the leaves of the mei cai into bigger chunks – about 1 cm and the stalk into smaller chunks – about 0.5cm.

Fry the garlic till fragrant and slightly browned. Then add in all the mei cai and fry till fragrant and dry. This can take quite long. I was actually watching tv and cooking this at the same time. but i used a really small – medium fire.

 
Fry fry fry fry till dry and nice. Since it takes a while, you can chop your pork into pieces while frying. Some of them aren't even totally cooked, but it's not a problem at all. Just chop them all up into big chunks. They will shrink slightly, so take that into consideration.

After chopping this up and when you mei cai seems to be done, take out the mei cai and place them on a plate. Adding a little oil, fry the pieces of pork.

It takes time to render the fat and get them all nice and crispy. So i did half a batch and got lazy so i didn't fry the other half. which i think was absolutely fine because these pieces shrunk much more and were harder after the frying and stewing. So half half is good.

Next, i added in 1 cup of light soy sauce and 1/2 cup of dark soy sauce and fried that together with all the pork. When you can smell the fragrance of the soy sauce, add in all the mei cai and mix thoroughly.
 
At this point, i transferred this mixture to a pressure cooker. You can transfer it to the normal pot and cook for around 2 hours or until the pork is amazingly tender. but i had a pressure cooker and we were hungry, so i transferred it to the pressure cooker and topped it up with 4 cups of water, or until the water covered the ingredients. Then add in the star anise – a tiny one or snap off 3 pieces of a big one – not a few hundred, like they like to do here..

Taste! I decided that it wasn't salty and dark coloured enough, so i added another splash of light and dark soy sauce. This is totally to your taste, but i make it slightly saltier because this is definitely a dish to eat with rice or porridge and not on it's own – although, we do eat it like that as well. haha!

Cover and cook! If you're using a pressure cooker, 30 minutes is great on medium pressure.

Next day tastes even better! Add hard boiled eggs before you keep it in the fridge and it will be perfect the next day!

 
Yum! Blogging about this has so totally made me crave for it again!!!

卤肉饭

I have done a post on this previously here. but this one. was done using a different cooking method and had a special ingredient in it.

The beauty of this dish is that, firstly, it is simple. Secondly, you can just add whatever seasonings you have on hand.

Ingredients

Pork Mince
Dark Soy Sauce
Light Soy Sauce
Huao Diao Jiu (or Sake, or whatever cooking wine)
Oyster Sauce
酱油膏 (Soya bean paste – entirely optional)
Water
Fried Shallots and its oil (Highly recommended)
Red onions
Pork Skin (optional)
Hard boiled eggs

Directions

In a pot, fry off some onions first to get them nice and caramelized. Then add in your pork mince and fry them. Keep frying them until all the liquid evaporates and you actually get some browning on the mince.

After this, it is really just a matter of pouring in all your seasonings and water and give it a good stir.

Pork Skin – with the pork skin, it helps to thicken the sauce at the end but usually requires a very long cooking time. So, i used my pressure cooker and it was so soft in just 15 minutes!

Hard boiled eggs – just boil them as you would and leave them in the soup to simmer together with the pork so that they get infused with all the flavours.

Best eaten with steamy hot rice and some green onions.

We really love this. Try it!

Pork Belly. An easy way.

Maybe about a month ago, i ordered 2 strips of pork belly from butcher2u, it wasn’t exactly what i wanted. I was used to ordering a big slab of pork belly but they didn’t have it on the website, but they had pork spare ribs (belly) with a little bone in them. It’s like shao rou – you know where you have the little white bone at the bottom. No harm really. I was intending to braise them but never got around too.

then one day, not too long ago, i remember something i ate with my mum a while back. I think we were in a hurry and we needed lunch, so we had to cook something to eat. it was so simple and yet, so delicious.

The fast way is to just boil a pot of water and simmer the meat in it, no marinade, nothing what so ever, just meat and water. Simmer till the meat is tender.

In my case, i had class that day from 4-6pm. So before i left the house, i washed meat and plucked the hairs and placed it into my rice cooker with adequate water covering the meat (i used it as stock for another dish). I used the soup setting and set it to cook for 2 hours.

When i returned home, the meat was wonderfully tender.

All you then need to do is slice the meat up into little chunks. It’s a little messy cause it’s so tender. you could always just have the whole piece to yourself, then you don’t have to cut it.

What’s the other most important thing? Your dip.

And it’s simple too. Just dark soy sauce and sliced red chilli. I like mine spicy.

If you wanna make it a little more fancy, add some grated garlic.

This is so so so so delicious.

The 3 of us just ate this was bowls of rice and a plate of veggies. Hui actually took a second bowl of rice – she usually doesn’t.

Sorry there’s no pictures. but it sure was delicious.

Time to head back to butcher2u to get more pork belly!

Wantons/Wontons (Recipe)!

I love wantons. especially deep fried wantons. who loves wantons? me!
Last year, fish and i had classes in the afternoon. He has class in the morning but i didn’t, so i sometimes make him a little lunch. This one day, i decided on making wantons. deep fried of course. and he loved it.

Crunchy Crunchy!
My mixture really is quite simple.
Ingredients
Pork Mince
Hua Diao Jiu
Cooking Sake
Spring Onions, finely chopped
Oyster sauce
Light Soy Sauce
Sesame Oil
An egg – i didn’t have an egg on the day i marinated the meat, i only added this right before i wrapped it.

The Hua Diao Jiu gave it an amazing flavour. I didn’t manage to cook it as soon as i wanted to, so i marinated it for around 2 days.
The oyster sauce i only ever use is this:
 
This is Lee Kum Kee’s Premium Oyster Sauce. The first ingredient on the list is 40% oyster extractives instead of another one of Lee Kum Kee’s panda oyster sauce which first ingredient is water and oyster extract is 4th on the list.
This however, is double the price of most oyster sauces. Over here, this bottle costs AUD$7+. But i won’t stop using it. for one, i love the flavour of this oyster sauce.
secondly, this was the oyster sauce that my grandmother used. i never knew what brand it was, or what it was called, but when she needed us to buy this, she would tell us that we have to make sure that we buy the oyster sauce with the boy and the girl. She was adamant that this was ‘the one’. So this is ‘the one’ i will be using.
 
Wantons really aren’t that difficult to make.
First: Put the wrapper on your palm.
Second: Place a good amount of meat mixture in the centre.
Third: Wet the edges of the skin with water.
Fourth: Press the diagonal corners together. then push the sides to stick together so that it looks like that on picture no. 5
 
The skins that i bought this time, was slightly thicker than what i usually use.
so when i deep fried this, i double fried it, so as to ensure that the skin gets nice and crispy and that the meat is cooked inside.
 
I just ate this simply with japanese mayo. and it is so crispy and delicious.

I ate this with noodles. The meat was quite juicy and very flavourful and delicious.
Yummo!

Smothered Pork Chops!

What drew me to this recipe was the sauce really, i’m not much of a meat eater, so it really was the onion sauce that was divine. This recipe was taken from Food Wishes. Chef John has some really great recipes!

This is my take on it. Almost the same, just a wee different.

Ingredients

2 Pork Chops, butterflied into 4 – i got these from butcher2u.com.au
1 1/2 – 2 Onions, sliced – i used more cause we love our onions
5 cloves Garlic, chopped – i like my garlic
A piece of the white part of a spring onion
1 rounded tbsp plain flour
1 1/2 cup chicken broth – do not replace with water, i’ve tried.
1/4 cup buttermilk, or sour cream in smaller qty
A few whole peppercorns
Salt and Pepper

Directions

I am using our Le Creuset a lot these days, cause i like it loads.

So, in a pan, preferably non-stick or cast iron, or something along those lines, fry/sear/brown your pork chops in a little olive oil.

And sooner or later, your pot/pan should have those little brown bits stuck to the bottom – and that, is what we want!

So, when the pork chops are brown and maybe 80% cooked, you can take them off and onto a plate.

and now. onto the onion sauce.

After all the slicing and crying over the onions, dump them all into the same pot patterned with the little brown bits and a little oil.

Fry and fry and fry. We want the onions to caramelize and go really brown and soft – as brown and soft as you can get them.

When they’re nearly done, add the garlic in and let them fry for a little while.

Then, add in the flour and fry to cook off the taste of the flour.

Add in the chicken stock and bring to a boil. If you find the sauce too thick, add a splash of water – i found that i didn’t have to. At this point, i also added a few whole peppercorns (fish really liked it) and a white part of a spring onion, just to add a different onion flavour to the sauce.

When it boils, add in your pork chops and the juices that are on the plate into the sauce to warm up the chops. Add in also the buttermilk or sour cream. This slight acidity is to counter the sweetness of the onions.

Once they are cooked to your liking and heated up, serve!

I served it over freshly cooked basmati rice. I’m really loving basmati rice now. Although, when i cook it over the stove, there’s always rice stuck to the bottom, i’m not sure how much water to put if i’m using my rice cooker though.

I really liked this sauce and have used it over minute steaks as well. I think it would be awesome over mash potatoes, just add a little cornstarch to make it thicker and more peppercorns as well!

I hope you try it!

Char Siu Pork

So i’ve been wanting to make Char Siu Pork for a long time but have not tried yet. so. i’ve managed to get a nice piece of pork neck/shoulder from the butcher 2 weeks ago. Nice amount of meat with fat – not too much though.

So, i found a recipe from RasaMalaysia for BBQ Pork.

I followed it very much to the T and it was quite perfect.

 
Doesn’t look too bad eh.

It is extraordinarily easy to make. and if you’re hesitating, you should not.

Ingredients

400g Pork Neck/Shoulder
3-4 cloves of Garlic, finely chopped
1 1/2 tbsp oil (I used onion oil which i made by frying small red onions)

Char Siew Sauce

1 1/2 tbsp Maltose
1 1/2 tbsp Honey 
(I didn’t have Maltose on hand, so i used 3 tbsp of raw Australian honey)
1 1/2 tbsp Hoisin Sauce
1 1/2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp Hua Diao Wine
3-4 dashes of white pepper powder
1/2 tsp five spice powder
1/2 tsp black sesame oil

Directions

Prepping

Make the Char Siew sauce first.

Place all the ingredients for the Char Siew Sauce in a small saucepan. Be careful when heating it as the sauce will bubble and might go over if you’re not careful – and you totally don’t want that happening since it’s sticky and sweet.

It should become well mixed and ever so thicken and sticky. Take the pot off the heat and let it cool down. It’s going to be the marinate for the pork – so you don’t want to cook the pork by pouring hot liquid on it.

My pork was a long strip. So i sliced it up into 5 portions so that i can better handle and cook it.

When its cooled, marinate the pork with 2/3 of the char siew sauce and the chopped garlic. It is best to marinate overnight. I marinated it for about approx 24 hours.

In the remaining char siew sauce, i added in 1 1/2 tbsp of onion oil and kept it covered in the fridge.

Cooking

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees.

Roast the char siew for 15 minutes, ensuring that the pork does not bring along a big amount of liquid.

(RasaMalaysia does this differently – but i don’t have what she does, so i adapted)

In a lightly oiled grill pan. grill the pieces of pork till charred while basting it with the char siew sauce + onion oil mixture. Don’t use it all up.

The thing to be very careful here is that with honey burns and blackens quickly. So be very careful. and try to not use too high a heat.

I realised that my pork itself wasn’t charred. Rather, it was the sauce that had charred. The pork should be quite cooked in the oven since it was sliced into smaller pieces.

 
When cooked, place on a plate to rest the meat for a while. then slice into thin slices.

Fish made a sauce to go with the char siew since more sauce is always better. You can just pour the sauce directly or you could follow fish.

He heated up the sauce, added extra Hua Diao Wine and Hoisin sauce. that’s why the extra sauce in the first picture.

I hope you guys try it. It is seriously good. and really simple.

Happy Eating!

Dinner & 走油焖肉 (Braised Pork Belly)

 
Dinner took a long time today. I started cooking at around 430pm and we only had dinner at 9pm. =)

What we had for dinner today was… the pork belly shown above, steamed egg and some little fried stuffs.

That was dinner. and what i really wanted to share with you guys, is the meat. It was the first time i had cooked it in this manner and it was amazingly good. Fish loved it.

I got the recipe off 阿芳的私房菜. It is called 走油焖肉.

I’m going to share it with you guys today and i had made some changes to the recipe to suit what i had on hand.

Ingredients

Pork Belly – ours was a long strip
4 cloves of Garlic – i would have used more, but i had none left
1 Star Anise

Sauce
1/2 cup Dark Soy Sauce
1/2 tsp Salt
2 tbsp Rock Sugar
2 1/2 cups Water

*Other ingredients i didn’t add
Dried Orange Peel
Red Chilli

Directions

Get a frying pan – preferably something with a lid because the oil spits everywhere!

Fry the pork belly skin side down till golden brown. Then continue to fry on all sides.

After frying, place the fried pork belly into a bowl of water and soak in there for an hour to remove oil. (I didn’t do it for exactly an hour, maybe 45mins)

I used my Korean pot to fry the pork, then removed most of the oil. After water soaking the pork, put it back into the pot, add the garlic, star anise and all the other ingredients for the sauce.

Cook it for 2 hours. I cooked it for slightly longer – around 2 1/2 hours.

Sliced the pork belly up and i did something that was not included in the original recipe.

Fish got me to fry up the slices of pork. So i dry fried them till golden brown.

For the first time, we did not eat our pork belly with the sauce.

Fish came up with a sauce to accompany the pork instead.

*He added onion oil w/ fried onions, chilli powder and dark soy sauce.

It was very good. The meat was not meltingly soft, but it was Q and chewy but not at all tough. The fats were very Q and not squishy and it doesn’t leave your mouth feeling as if you’ve just swallowed oil.

So… this is a definite favourite and i will be making it again and again.

**To make this more educational, i’m going to try to translate what she was saying in her book regarding this sort of cooking method.

走油 is basically frying the pork in oil then submerging in cold water. This causes the meat and fats to become soft yet still able to retain its shape. Soft yet elastic, wobbly in a way. So, it is slightly more troublesome, but yet it makes a real difference to the end product.

I hope you guys really try this because it is amazing! =)

We had a great great dinner!

滷肉饭！Stewed Minced Pork w/ Rice

I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE this.

It is so simple. and can be used on many dishes. On top of rice, on top of noodles, or on top of plain vegetables.

I made this last week, i think. It was very well received and we loved it.

To make it more Taiwanese, i cooked sushi rice instead – which is closer to the type of rice eaten in Taiwan, but i washed the rice around 5-6 times to get rid of its starchiness, if not the rice would be way to sticky. We also had fried chicken chops, but they weren’t the most successful ever, so i won’t be sharing that today.

Anyway, for the highlight…!

Doesn’t that look delicious? I’m getting hungry just looking at it!

Here’s the recipe!

Ingredients

400gm Minced Pork
1 Brown Onion, chopped
5-6 cloves Garlic, chopped
1/4tsp Five Spice Powder
100ml Oyster Sauce
50ml Dark Soya Sauce
25ml Sake (or any other cooking wine)
400ml Water
5g Rock Sugar

Directions

1. Chop the onions. and fry them in a sauce pan. Fry till they softened and become translucent. Add the chopped garlic and fry till fragrant. The reason for adding the garlic only when the onions are nearly done or done, is so to ensure that the garlic doesn’t burn and turn bitter.

2. Add the minced pork into the garlic and onions and fry till cooked and separated.

3. When the pork is cooked (all turns white), add in the five spice powder, oyster sauce, dark soya sauce, rock sugar, sake and water. Let the mixture come to a boil.

4. For best results, transfer to a claypot to cook for at least 1 hour, simmering on low heat. (We don’t have a claypot, but we do have a korean pot which worked perfectly)

5. Simmer away for at least an hour. The liquids should have reduced and you should end up with a nice slightly thick consistency to the sauce. There should be sauce – don’t simmer till there is none left. If you want a little bit more sauce, then add more water and simmer again (i did this for the next day).

Notes: It should be salty enough, definitely. Always taste. 
           Try to use pork with a little fat on them. Fats are extremely important.

To change it: Instead of buying ready minced pork, you could get 五花肉 with skin on and make your own minced pork, but to wash and blanch your pork first before mincing.

!!!!!!

This is how to make this wonderfully simple dish. We had it for dinner over rice. The next day, i cooked more rice and fish and hui had this over rice again in their lunch boxes. As for me, i cooked myself a bit of egg noodles and it over noodles. Delicious!

Do Do Do Do Do try this! I’m sure you will like it as much as we did!

There are a lot of other variations to this dish and i’ll post them as i cook them!

KEEP SMILING! =)

Stewed Pork / Dongpo Rou

Hello Hello!

Today….it was a great day. I slept ard 5pm last night..so i woke up at 2am. Then…at 930am, me and fish walked over to macdonalds for breakfast. After that, we went to the butchery.

I bought 4 links of beef sausage - $2.70 (dunno whether nice or not though)
One slab of Pork Belly – $7.20

SO, i decided to make stewed pork that i really love today! I had to call my mum and dad to ask them about the recipe.

It was delicious!

This is very much a very simple recipe which you can alter as much as you like – which is why i didn’t measure anything…hehe

  

Step 1: Scrap the skin with the blade of a knife and pluck any remaining hairs

Step 2: Using 5 spice powder, rub it all over the pork – like a dry rub.
Step 3: Place the pork in the pot.

Step 4: With the pork, add crushed garlic, ginger and star anise. I added around 11 cloves of garlic, 1/4 garlic and 3 edges of a star anise.

Step 5: Add good dark soy sauce.

  
I should have sliced the pork into half for easier manageability. =)

Step 6: Marinate the pork ( in my case, i had to turn it frequently to get all sides). I think i marinated it for around 45 mins to 1 hour.

Step 7: Add enough water to cover the pork. Boil for around 30 minutes till the pork cooks before you try the sauce to see its saltiness and flavour. I added 2 more cloves of garlic. When it boils down, add more water if it is too salty.

Step 8: I simmer the whole mixture for around 2 hours. The fats and meat tasted really good and was really tender. However, the flavour didn’t penetrate totally.

Anyways, we ate half of the pork and will eat the other half tomorrow – in which by then the flavour should have totally penetrated.

Also, this is such a versatile dish. I added firm tofu which should be cooked for quite some time as well so that the flavour gets into it.

I wanted to add hard boiled eggs as well, but we ran out of eggs. So, tomorrow i will go buy eggs and add it into the mixture!

I hope you guys try making this for yourself or family – its really simple and tastes really really good! Remember that garlic is a really important flavour in this dish – so don’t be stingy about it!