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. 

  

The red-cooked pork and bean curd of Zhejiang

In the movie It's Complicated, Meryl Streep plays a baker who whips up ice cream when she can't sleep.  I now understand the attraction of cooking when the rest of the world is fast asleep.  

Unable to keep my eyes closed the other night, I finally gave up and started reading an East China cookbook that looked really delicious.  Written by the daughter of the chef to the former presidents of Taiwan, it was packed with a whole lot of classics from around the Yangtze River area, and as the clock eased its way around to 5:00 am, the picture of red-cooked pork in there began to look more and more enticing.

"Red-cooked" food, if you've never tried it before, is one of the lodestones of Chinese cooking.  Just about anything solid - meat, chicken, fish, bean curd, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, hard-boiled eggs, carrots, potatoes, you name it - can be slowly braised in this homey sauce of soy sauce, wine, sugar, and aromatics.  

My mother-in-law was from Tianjin up near Beijing, and she said in no uncertain terms that red-cooked anything was northern food.  And so I had always thought that was the case... that is until I started reading up on this in my Chinese cookbooks.

On this one salient point, I'm afraid that my mother-in-law was wrong.  Every book I've read states in their own uncertain terms that red-cooked foods are a hallmark of eastern Chinese cuisine, out near Shanghai and thereabouts.  It's an area with some true classics.  The Dongpo Pork I introduced last fall is one of them, and others on my Great Hits list would be red-cooked fish tails (huashui), which is a whole lot better than it sounds, as well as its utterly addictive Wuxi Spareribs.

Reduce the sauce til syrupy

Today's dish is similar in some ways to that last dish, because it too features pork, and the sauce is a rich, velvety, sweetish sauce that relies on the gentle dang of dark vinegar to brighten the flavors.  Use any good, slightly fatty cut of good quality pork that you like - spareribs or pork belly would be terrific -because the fat turns into these buttery layers that contrast perfectly with the tender, flavorful meat.

So anyway, there I was in the wee hours, pulling a piece of pork shoulder out of the fridge and wondering how to make it without waking up the household.  This recipe doesn't require any frying, and I gradually wanted to get back into bed for at least an hour or two, so I congratulated myself when I suddenly recalled my dusty old crockpot.  Out it came, in went the ingredients without much preparation at all, and when I woke up later on, the house was perfumed from top to bottom.  Now that's what I call a perfect dish.

If you make it in a crockpot, the juices won't have the chance to reduce, so put the cooked meat and sauce into a pan or wok and reduce the sauce over high heat until it's syrupy.  Either serve the pork right away with a bit of the sauce or cool it off and store it for a day or two, which only makes it better.

Delicious!

The sauce is fantastic in its own right, so don't waste it.  Instead, cook something else in it, like bean curd or sliced carrots, and have yet another dish with a minimum of effort.

As with lots of Zhejiang dishes, this has dark vinegar in it and it tends to be a bit on the sweet side.  Use less sugar, if you like, and omit the vinegar if you'd prefer the milder Jiangsu style of flavoring.  But whatever you do, this will taste delicious!

Zhejiang style red-cooked pork  
Zheshi hongshao rou 浙式紅燒肉 
Zhejiang
Serves 6 to 8 as part of a multicourse meal  

2 pounds pork belly or picnic shoulder, or about 2 to 3 pounds pork ribs cut into 2-inch pieces
6 tablespoons good quality regular soy sauce
4 to 8 tablespoons rock sugar or brown sugar
2 tablespoons good quality dark vinegar
4 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine
10 tablespoons filtered water
1 inch ginger, thinly sliced
6 green onions, trimmed and cut into 2-inch pieces

Creamy bean curd

1. Rinse the pork and pat dry.  Cut the pork into 1-inch slices, and then cut each piece again into strips that are about 1 x 1 x 2 inches; if you're using pork ribs, cut between the bones.

2. Combine all of the ingredients in a crockpot, cover the pot, turn it on high, and once the liquid is hot, lower the heat and let the pork simmer for 2 to 3 hours, or until tender.  Iif you want to cook this in a wok, add everything to the wok, bring the sauce to a boil, cover closely, and lower the heat to the lowest setting, but keep an eye on the sauce, as it might boil away, and add a bit more water as needed.

3. When the pork is tender and the fat is creamy and luscious, reduce the sauce by boiling it down quickly until it is the consistency of maple syrup.  (It's important that the sauce be thick and gorgeous, because then it will cling to the meat, make it shiny, and give every bite that extra layer of flavor.)

An instant second dish

4. Serve immediately or store for later; steam the pork to heat it up.

Variation: Red-cooked bean curd is really simple.  All you need to do is cut up one block of firm bean curd into about 12 slices.  Place them in the thickened sauce (don't add any water, as the curd will release water as it cooks), bring the sauce to a boil, lower the heat, and then gently cook the bean curd until the sauce is reduced once again. Flip the slices over half way during the cooking process so that both sides get to absorb the sauce.