Chinese · Main
Char Siu Pork
- Intermediate
- 75 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, char used as punctuation, on a drift of smoke.
Ingredients
- 800g pork shoulder, cut into long strips
- 3 tbsp hoisin, 2 tbsp soy, 2 tbsp honey
- 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
- 2 tsp five-spice
- Red fermented tofu (optional, for the classic hue)
The skills inside
FermentationRoasting in a hot ovenThe broiler: heat from aboveMarinating: acid, salt and timeResting meat & slicing against the grain
The words inside
Chinese Five-SpiceSalamander, Broiler & Top-Down FirePork Shoulder: Butt vs. Picnic
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · soy · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Marinate pork 4–24 hours; reserve marinade. 600 min
- Roast at 200°C on a rack, 30–40 min, turning once. 40 min
- Boil the marinade with extra honey into a glaze; brush every 10 min. 10 min
- Finish under the broiler for charred, lacquered edges. Rest, slice thick.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
The broiler: heat from above 22 recipes
- The element is fully lit and the compartment is hot before anything goes under it. A broiler switched on with the food already in place browns nothing for several minutes and then burns it in one.
- The distance was set before the dish went in, not adjusted afterwards with a hot dish in one hand: how close it sits is the only heat control this method has.
- Somebody stayed with it for the whole time. The window between pale and bitter is tens of seconds, and nothing under a broiler is ever safe to walk away from.
- The surface has coloured evenly right across, having been turned at least once; every grill has a hot corner and none of them say where it is.
- What is underneath is no further cooked than when it went in. Top heat is there to finish a surface, and anything that came out hotter all the way through was reheated rather than glazed.
Where it goes wrong It was treated as an oven setting: food in, timer set, cook walks away. Radiant heat from above has no gentle phase, so the surface goes from pale to bitter inside a minute while the inside is untouched, and there is no stage in between to catch.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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