Northern Chinese · Soup
Suan Cai Bai Rou
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, aromatics blooming from the first bite, with a lingering ferment tang.
Ingredients
- 800 g pork belly, skin on, in one piece
- 2 L water
- 40 g ginger, sliced
- 3 spring onions, in lengths
- 2 star anise
- 15 g Shaoxing wine
- 600 g suan cai (northeastern fermented napa cabbage)
- 100 g sweet potato glass noodles, soaked 30 minutes
- 200 g pork blood sausage, sliced 5 mm (optional)
- 6 g salt
- 40 g furu (fermented bean curd), mashed
- 20 g Chinese sesame paste
- 30 g jiucai hua (fermented chive flower sauce)
- 4 garlic cloves, minced
- 15 g chilli oil
- a handful of coriander, chopped
The skills inside
FermentationStraining & passing through a sieveKeeping the cooking liquidThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · sesame · 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
- Cover the belly with the water, add ginger, spring onion, star anise and wine, bring it up and then drop the heat so the surface only trembles. Hold it there 60 minutes, until a skewer meets no resistance at the thickest point and the skin has gone translucent. 60 min
- Lift the belly out, press it under a weight and chill 2 hours, until it is firm enough to slice 2 mm thin without the layers sliding apart. Keep the broth. 120 min
- Rinse the suan cai once, squeeze it hard in both hands and shred it very fine along the grain, then simmer it in the strained broth for 40 minutes, until it turns from squeaky to yielding and the broth smells clean and sour rather than sharp. 40 min
- Slide in the sliced belly, the glass noodles and the blood sausage if using, and simmer 10 minutes more, until the noodles turn clear and the fat on the pork has gone glassy. 10 min
- Whisk furu, sesame paste, chive flower sauce, garlic and chilli oil into a dipping sauce, scatter coriander over the pot, and let each person dip slice by slice.
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.
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.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
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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