pork belly – 好心人

Pork Belly in Soya Sauce

April 4, 2015 by Ho Lang

Pork Belly in Soya Sauce

I am making a very simple pork belly in soya sauce. This dish is great for breakfast or if you wanna have it with buns and lots of Chinese Parsley. Plus I bought a different brand and type of soya sauce recently and this is the thick type, compared to the more diluted one. I wanted to try out and see if this works as well.

Some of you may remember that I made something quite similar before. That was the Braised Pork Belly in Soya Sauce. Maybe you might ask how different is this version compared to that one. The difference is largely in the soya sauce. I am also adding galangal in this version, so I think it will have a slightly different taste to it.

I left out the mushrooms, so it would be interesting to try out this plain version. Also I had already pre-cooked the pork belly when I prepared my Boiled Pork Belly for the soup stock. So cooking time is merely to heat it up and it is great for quick meals if you are short for time.

Recipe

Ingredients

200 grams of Pork Belly (cut in chunks, pre-cooked)
2 tbsp of Dark Soya Sauce
1 Cinnamon stick (about 5cm)
3-4 cm Galangal (blue ginger)

Method

1. Place the pork belly (usually it is frozen) into the claypot. Add the soya sauce, cinnamon stick and galangal. For the blue ginger, you can either slice or bruise it.

2. Add a one and half cups of water and boil at low heat for about 45 minutes. Keep stirring to prevent the sauce from burning. Once done, garnish with Chinese Parsley if you like.

Bon Appetit!

Spicy Szechuan Vegetables with Minced and Pork Belly

November 30, 2014 by Ho Lang

Spicy Szechuan Vegetables with Minced and Pork Belly

This is a childhood classic for me. I remember the nanny cooking this for lunch on a few occasions, although I can’t really remember the details of what she cooked though, I mean who can? It’s been so many years. Alright, I know I said I had a photographic memory before, but this is different.

So when she told me that it was from Szechuan province, from a far away place and that it traveled very far to get to our home. It was a little unbelievable at first. She said that everyone from that place simply loves and adore the vegetable, and that they would eat it day and night. I thought that they must be extremely proud and sad at the same time eating it. I mean I would be proud knowing that the world was eating my “vegetable”, but yet at the same time, I would be sad because everyone in the world would think that it was all that we ate all day. There was probably nothing much else to eat. Of course I am sure they do eat other vegetables but as a child, we thought in absolutes.

Years past and the dish has become commonplace in many cai fan 菜饭 places. Some places do it well while others just cannot make it. Anyway, wifey wanted to eat this dish and since we had the szechuan vegetable in the fridge, I thought that it was also good time to cook it.

My rendition of the classic dish is to add pork belly and minced pork with some chilli padi and a dash of dark soy sauce. I bought my szechuan vegetable from the wet market, which basically meant that it was likely to be spicy and very high in salt content. There are different types of szechuan vegetable that are being sold in the supermarkets and these are already shredded nicely for the cook and they are not so salty. They come in a variety of spicy and non-spicy which really helps if you want to make a non-spicy version.

Recipe

Ingredients

half a dollop of Szechuan Vegetable – purchased from the wet market, high in salt content and spicy
100 grams of Pork Belly – following from the recipe for preparing boiled pork belly
150-160 grams of Minced Pork
a tbsp of Dark Soy Sauce
4-5 pcs of Garlic
4 pcs of Chilli Padi

Method

1. Soak the szechuan vegetables in a bowl of hot water. I realised that it is better to slice them thinly first before soaking. This would help a lot. Recommended to soak at least 30 minutes. While that is soaking, mince the garlic and heat up the oil in the wok. Fry until fragrant.

2. Add in pork belly and fry, moderate the heat to a medium. Then add the minced pork and fry until the colour just change which suggests that it is semi-cooked. Then add in the shredded szechuan vegetable along with the shredded chilli padi. Fry the dish until it is more or less cooked, then add a dash of the dark soy sauce and continue stirring. The end result should look a little bit like the picture below.

Bon Appetit!!

Boiled Pork Belly

November 1, 2014 by Ho Lang

Boiled Pork Belly

This is my mother-in-law’s recipe. Which I tried to follow but failed miserably because I was busy doing some other things – like paying bills. So multitasking is just another word for distraction. Nuff said.

She cooked this lovely pork belly, boiled and it was just the simplest dish in the world. I dipped it in home-made chilli sauce and it was out of this world. I had to learn and do it.

I asked her in my mixture of pidgin Chinese and deciphered enough to know that it was really the easiest recipe in the world. The only criteria was that the pork belly had to be beautiful or 漂亮. I asked her how to know if it was 漂亮, she said that I would know it when I saw it.

And so, I met the butcher this morning and he offered me what he had left for the day. The slab of pork belly had two nipples on it, and I thought maybe this was what she (MIL) meant by 漂亮.

So I asked the uncle to give me pork belly that was 漂亮, and he proudly said “这个很漂亮!”

I guess since he was the butcher, he can’t be wrong, and so I paid the man $15 (SGD) and the rest was as they say, history.

Recipe

Ingredients:

1 kg of 漂亮 Pork Belly
Sea salt

Method:

1. In a large pot, boil water till boiling. Place pork belly into pot with water covering the meat. With slow fire, boil for at least 45 minutes. After the meat is cooked, turn off the fire and allow it to sit in the pot for another 15 minutes.

2. Take the cooked pork belly and then rub it with sea salt. Allow the meat to cool and then wrap it up in a ziplock bag and throw it into the freezer.

3. You can keep the meat for all kinds of dishes, either sliced and eaten in its own. Or fried with vegetables. The stock can be preserved into plastic containers and used for flavoring for other dishes.

Bon Appetit!