The World Table

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Jiangnan · Main

Hong Shao Rou

  • Intermediate
  • 35 min
  • roughly 3 of 4 for cost

umami-deep · rich · sweet-edged · aromatic Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, richness that coats and comforts, opening aromatic and staying there.

Ingredients

  • 800 g skin-on pork belly, cut into 4 cm cubes
  • 40 g rock sugar (bing tang), crushed
  • 30 ml neutral oil
  • 60 ml Shaoxing huadiao wine
  • 30 ml light soy sauce
  • 15 ml dark soy sauce
  • 5 slices ginger
  • 3 spring onions, knotted
  • 2 star anise
  • 1 short piece cassia bark
  • 600 ml just-boiled water
  • 3 g salt

The skills inside

Reducing a sauceSugar stages & caramelFrying the paste until the oil splitsThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil

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

  1. Cover the belly with cold water, bring it up slowly with a slice of ginger and a splash of the wine, and lift the cubes out once the grey scum stops rising; drain and pat every face dry or the sugar will spit at you.
  2. Melt the rock sugar in the oil over a low flame and watch it go from clear syrup to weak tea to the colour of dark honey, about 90 seconds from the first colour; the moment it smells nutty, tip in the pork.
  3. Toss hard until every cube is lacquered mahogany and the fat has started to run clear at the edges.
  4. Splash the Shaoxing down the hot side of the pot, add both soys, the aromatics, the salt and just enough boiling water to cover, then hold at a bare tremble for 60 minutes until a chopstick passes through the skin with no resistance. 60 min
  5. Take the lid off, raise the heat and reduce, spooning the liquid back over the cubes, until it hangs on them in a glossy sheet and the oil runs clear red round the rim.

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.

Sugar stages & caramel 53 recipes

  • Nothing is stirred once it is boiling, and any crystals clinging to the side of the pan are brushed down rather than left to fall in.
  • Judged by temperature or by a tested stage rather than by time: consecutive stages are a few degrees apart and look identical in the pan.
  • Colour is read off the heat and in good light, remembering that sugar keeps darkening after the flame is out.
  • Stopped decisively at the point wanted: off the heat and into the next liquid or onto a cold surface, rather than left to coast in a hot pan.
  • The result is clear and smooth rather than grainy, cloudy, or seized into a solid mass.

Where it goes wrong It was stirred after coming to the boil, or a stray crystal from the side of the pan fell back in. One crystal seeds the whole pan and the syrup turns grainy within seconds, and once sugar has crystallised the only cure is more water and starting the whole thing again.

Reducing a sauce 95 recipes

  • A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
  • Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
  • The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
  • Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
  • Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.

Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.

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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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Hong Shao Rou Technique: Sugar stages & caramelThe skill inside this recipe The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Jiangnan kitchen