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Jiangnan · Soup

Yan Du Xian

  • Easy
  • 30 min
  • roughly 3 of 4 for cost

rich · aromatic · silky Leads with richness that coats and comforts, aromatics blooming from the first bite, melting away silken.

Ingredients

  • 400 g salt cured pork belly (xian rou)
  • 500 g fresh pork belly or ribs
  • 300 g spring bamboo shoots
  • 150 g tofu knots (bai ye jie)
  • 30 ml Shaoxing wine
  • 30 g ginger, sliced
  • 2 spring onions, knotted
  • 2.5 L water

The skills inside

Brining & curingThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSalted water & the float testBlanching & shockingSkimming: foam, fat and a clear broth

The words inside

Bamboo Shoots

Allergen screen

Found: 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. Soak the cured pork in cold water for 3 hours with two changes, then boil a slice for a minute and taste it; if it stings, soak it longer, because this is the only salt the pot will get. 180 min
  2. Blanch both meats from cold water, skimming until the grey foam stops rising, then rinse the meat and the pot.
  3. Simmer the meats with the ginger, spring onion and wine at a bare tremble for 60 minutes, skimming as you go, then push it to a rolling boil for 20 minutes until the broth turns opaque and milky. 60 min
  4. Peel the shoots to the pale core, roll cut them and blanch 3 minutes to take the scratch out, then add them with the tofu knots and simmer 20 minutes until the shoots are translucent at the edge and the knots are heavy with broth. 3 min
  5. Taste it before it goes to the table and add nothing but more of its own liquid if it falls short.

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.

Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes

  • It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
  • The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
  • Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
  • The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
  • Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.

Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.

Blanching & shocking 76 recipes

  • A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
  • Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
  • The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
  • It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
  • Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.

Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.

At the Table

The Pour
Chenin Blanc (Vouvray sec)
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 Yan Du Xian Technique: Building an emulsionThe skill inside this recipe The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Jiangnan kitchen