The Books Are Here!!! + Zhejiang's Pork in a Crock!

Look at this! #1 New Release on Amazon's Chinese Cooking!!

And it's coming out TOMORROW!!

Please excuse my excitement... this has been a very long time coming. Ten years, to be exact, and I am so thrilled and grateful and downright happy that All Under Heaven is finally seeing the light of day. Thank you all for your incredible support!

The Dim Sum Field Guide is doing very well indeed, too: #1 on Amazon in the General China Travel Guides department! 

Other great news: We are getting great reviews across the board. Georgia Freedman had a generous couple of things to say on the Wall Street Journal about All Under Heaven. Tasting Table featured All Under Heaven in its article, "The Most Exciting New Cookbooks for Fall 2016." Both books are given a very nice mention on Eat Your Books. Virginia Miller @ThePerfectSpot called my twins "the book of the week (or 2)" on Twitter, and the Cookbook Junkies made my head explode with this insanely lovely bunch of words and cookbook giveaway - thank you, Jenny and Marc!

One of my recipes is up on Epicurious. Please, try it and rate it! 

Plus, a very kind reader pointed out that my dim sum illustrations for Lucky Peach were given a great shoutout last year on First We Feast. Nice, and wow! (I need to learn to Google myself...)

And if you're in NYC around the middle of next month, please try to join me at the 92nd St Y for a talk about, well, you know.

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You’ve never had tender until you’ve eaten classically prepared Chinese pork. I’m not talking about stir-fries here, but braises, those rich, decadent, lip-smacking, mind-blowing, insanely addictive dishes that slowly cook for hours until the pork belly or shank or what-have-you finally surrenders into a pillow of delectable textures that sponge up the sauce and make dinner that night a really good reason to celebrate.

Pork in a crock is popular throughout many parts of China. Shandong, Sichuan, Jiangsu, Hunan... it’s hard to find a Han Chinese cuisine that doesn’t fuss in its own way over this dish, adding local flavors to make it their very own. A lot of this has to do with history. Just like Europe, China’s food cultures are a reflection of mass migrations, wars, famines, and upheavals that sent entire villages out in search of better places to live. And, as with all people, they brought their families’ recipes with them, adding this and subtracting that as they cooked with what was there in the new neighborhood.

I witnessed a speeded-up version of this culinary evolution when I lived in Taiwan. The island was home to its own cuisine – basically a template from Quanzhou in southern Fujian tempered with flavors from the local Hakka people, a good dash of Japanese inspirations due to Taiwan’s status as a colony for 50 years, and influences from other ports of call in southern China. But as people from all over the country were busy setting down roots on the island following the fall of the Mainland and the ensuing mass immigration of 1949 to what we used to call Formosa, dishes from just about everywhere took root, too, and became part of Taiwan’s own culinary geography.

For example, Taiwan is renowned for its beef noodle soup, but when I first arrived in the mid-1970’s, few Taiwanese would even consider eating beef, as water buffalo were prized as farmers’ living tractors and were so important to their families that eating them would have been viewed as disgusting, and also incredibly ungrateful. But times have changed, and Taiwan is now a part of the developed world with semiconductor companies eating up the old rice paddies. 

But back to this week’s dish. This is basically red-cooked pork and is most definitely a Zhejiang delight, for you have your bamboo shoots, your ginger, your soy sauce, your generous amount of Shaoxing rice wine, and your touch of rock sugar. In fact, it calls for a whole lot of Shaoxing rice wine and only a smidgen of soy sauce, which means that it’s not terribly salty, but rather rich and decadent. My toes curl in excitement just smelling it cooking away on the counter.

I’ve tossed in a dozen hardboiled eggs, too, which makes my husband ridiculously happy. If you are not an egg fiend, use six or so, or even eliminate them – it doesn’t really matter. But around my house, if I aim to eat one of these eggs, I have to have a whole lot in there to distract him and to outwit his single-minded onslaught on this favorite food.

Use the best pork - with skin

One big difference between my recipe and the traditional one is that usually this calls for an actual crock that is sealed with cloth and mud so that not a drop of the juices is given the chance to turn into steam and disappear. I’ve gone a slightly easier route by turning to my trusty crockpot. It doesn’t emit a whole lot of steam, plus the heat is gentle enough to slowly cook the meat without ever burning, making this classic incredibly easy. Be sure and boil down the sauce until it is more concentrated, as this is one of the secrets to getting deeply hued meat, shoots, and eggs. If you’re lazy like me, just keep everything in the crockpot after the first day and plug the crockpot in once a day only until the liquid boils. Do that for two or three days, and the star attractions will turn a lovely mahogany hue through and through.

If you are having friends or even an important guest over for a meal, buy two bottles of good quality Shaoxing rice wine for the pork and a really good bottle for drinking. Dinner and your reputation as a great cook will have practically taken care of themselves.

Pork in a crock

Tánzi ròu 罈子肉

Zhejiang

Serves 4 to 8

Around 2 pounds / 900 g fresh pork belly with the skin on (see Tips)

Boiling water, as needed

1 pound / 450 g fresh or frozen peeled winter bamboo shoots

¼ cup / 1½ ounces / 45 g sliced fresh ginger

6 green onions, trimmed but left whole

2 (600 ml) bottles Shaoxing rice wine (see Tips)

6 to 12 large eggs, hardboiled and peeled

½ cup regular soy sauce

1 piece rock sugar, about the size of an egg

1. Start this at least one day - and preferably three - before serving. Cut the pork into 4 even pieces. Place these in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring the water to a boil and simmer the pork for about 10 minutes to remove the impurities. Then, dump out the water and scum, rinse off and dry the meat, and place it in a 4-quart crockpot.

Simmer away the scum

2. Cut up the bamboo shoots on the angle or with a roll cut into chunks around the size of a large egg. Add these to the crockpot along with the ginger and whole green onions. Bring the rice wine to a boil in a saucepan and then add it to the crockpot; pour in boiling water to cover. Place the lid on the crockpot and bring it to a boil. Cook the pork on high with the lid on for around 5 hours. The pork should at that point be very tender – check this by piercing it with a chopstick, which should glide through the meat as if it were soft butter.

3. At this point add the eggs, soy sauce, and rock sugar to the crockpot, cover again, and bring it to a boil on high before lower the heat and simmering it for another hour or so. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasoning with more soy sauce or sugar as needed. Turn off the crockpot and allow the pork to come to room temperature overnight with the lid on. It can be refrigerated, if you like, for a couple of days, or do as suggested in the headnotes – whatever you do, time is what is needed to give the flavors a good chance to improve.

Yum, yumyumyum

4. About an hour before serving, remove the fat layer on the sauce and use it for something else, like stir-frying vegetables. If you want, each piece of pork can first be sliced into four pieces for easier dining, the eggs halved, and the shoots cleaved in two, as well. (If the dish is cold, heat it slowly in the sauce until everything is warmed up.) Pluck out and discard the green onions, and then plate up the meat, eggs, and bamboo shoots in a wide, shallow bowl. Drizzle the sauce over everything or serve it on the side. If you’d rather, arrange the tidbits on top of rice before ladling the sauce on top. Any way you do this, it will end up amazingly delicious. Be sure and eat the fat and skin sitting on top of and around the meat: it won’t be in the least greasy, but rather will be more like munching on heavenly scented clouds.

Tips

The quality of two ingredients here are absolutely vital to the success of this dish: the pork and the rice wine.

Get your hands on some good pork belly with the skin on at an excellent butcher. What's good pork belly? First, it should be humanely raised and butchered. Nothing smells as bad as supermarket pork that comes from a factory farm. 

The best pork belly (also called a side of pork) is half meat and half fat: lots of thinnish, alternating lines of red and white. You do NOT want lean meat here - it will turn out tough and stringy. And if the meat parts of the pork belly happen to be too thick, they will never become tender. Remove any thick flap of meat that's on the inner surface of the belly and use it for a stir-fry or something, because you can forget about it ever softening up.

The not-so-secret ingredients

If you can't find good pork belly, look for a well-marbled shoulder (also called the pork butt). Since you want it with the skin on, this might require you to call ahead and reserve it. So, nurture a good relationship with your butcher, and soon you'll be able to buy all of those lovely cuts that work well in Chinese cooking: anything with skin, plus trotters, tails, cheeks, kidneys, livers, and so on. 

Good quality Shaoxing rice wine is also necessary here. Don't get the cheap brands, which can be like rotgut. If at all possible, hunt down Taiwan's TTL brand Shaoxing rice wine, which as a good, mushroomy, sherry-like flavor. It makes all the difference in the flavor of the sauce. And be sure to nibble on the sauce if you happen to chill it... it's insanely good that way.

Finally, note that the soy sauce is added toward the end. Salt tends to toughen meat, so try to hold back on adding soy sauce and salt to braises and soups until you get toward the end.