The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Jiangnan · Main

Yangzhou Shizi Tou

  • Intermediate
  • 40 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost

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

Ingredients

  • 500 g pork, two parts belly to one part shoulder
  • 60 g water chestnuts, finely diced
  • 100 ml cold ginger and spring onion water
  • 1 egg white
  • 15 g potato starch
  • 20 ml Shaoxing wine
  • 6 g salt
  • 1 g white pepper
  • 1 head Chinese cabbage (huang ya cai)
  • 1.2 L light pork stock

The skills inside

The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilShaping by hand

Allergen screen

Found: egg · nuts · 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. Chop the fat and the lean separately, then together, until the meat is loose grains the size of pomegranate seeds; a machine smears the fat through the lean and the ball comes out dense and bouncy.
  2. Add the wine, salt, pepper, egg white and starch, then beat in the cold ginger water 20 ml at a time, one direction only, until the meat is glossy and clings to an upturned palm.
  3. Fold through the water chestnuts and shape four balls of about 170 g, slapping each from palm to palm a dozen times until the surface is smooth and no air pockets are left.
  4. Line the pot with the outer cabbage leaves, lower the balls onto them and pour in stock to cover; bring it to 85C (185F) and hold it there, covered, for 90 minutes, never letting the surface do more than shiver. 90 min
  5. Drop the cabbage hearts in for the last 20 minutes and serve everything in the broth, which should still be clear enough to read the pattern on the bowl. 20 min

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.

Shaping by hand 85 recipes

  • The pieces match: weighed, or judged against each other rather than by dividing the mass by eye, so that no piece is half again the size of its neighbour.
  • Surfaces are smooth and unbroken with no cracks, tears, or dry patches, and the seams are sealed and sitting underneath.
  • The shape is defined and it holds while the tray waits: it has not slumped, spread, or relaxed back out of its form.
  • Nothing is trapped that should not be: no air pocket where filling should be, no filling breaking through the surface, and no excess flour greying the outside.
  • They finish together in the heat: no piece done while another is still raw, which is the only test that the first mark was met.

Where it goes wrong The dough was worked past its point or shaped without a rest, so it fought back: the pieces spring out of shape on the tray and bake tight, uneven, and torn along the surface.

The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes

  • The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
  • It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
  • The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
  • Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
  • The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.

Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.

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 Yangzhou Shizi Tou The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Jiangnan kitchen