Cooking The Books

Dongpo Pork

Pork is my favourite meat.  Whether it's minced in dumplings, cured into bacon, sausage or ham, griddled in chop form or slow roast till it melts in the mouth I think there's no meat more versatile.  It may not be as glamourous as a fillet steak but the variety of flavours and texture it offers are second to none.  The Chinese know this with them consuming something like 70% of the pork eaten on this planet and they were the first to domesticate this animal a good few thousand years ago, in fact if a chinaman says meat then what they mean is pork.

For melt in the mouth succulence the cut of choice for me has to be belly.  With slow cooking the layers of fat melt away, redering out and through the surrounding meat keeping it moist and breaking it down into its individual striations.  The aim always being to gain the succulence the fat gives you but cooking it out enough that the fat isn't offputting in its chewiness.  I've roast it on the bone, deboned it and rolled it around a stuffing of herbs and confitted it and all have been a success so when I read about Dongpo Pork on this website I knew it was for me.  3 1/2 hours of various cooking methods, all low and slow, had to leave an amazing final texture.

Last weekend was a really busy one - 2 gigs, one meal for the girlfriend's parents, a musical and a museum visit with my parents -  so this weekend gone was to be spent at home, the perfect opportunity to cook a time intensive dish.  I only got as far as the supermarket so it wasn't the best bit of pork belly around and looked a little less fatty than the one on the recipe page.  It was only £4 odd for just over a kilo though so I can't grumble too much.

As far as the recipe goes the main issues were getting a uniform browning on it during the frying stage, the serious hot oil spitting at that point and the finding something to steam a kilo lump of meat in.  The curved bit of pork belly just did not want to sit right in the frying pan and holding it down whilst it popped and spat has left a series of burns all over my hands.  To steam I used a big flat saucepan, creating to big boulders out of crushed up tin foil to rest the pork on above the water level.  Outside of these the recipe went very smoothly and once cooked and the sauce drizzled over I couldn't wait to get stuck in and find out if you really could pull the meat away with chopsticks.

 

The simple answer to this is, yes, you could.  I thought the photo at the top of the page summed the texture up perfectly.  The skin was so soft you could push chopsticks through it yet it still retained a nice, gelationous chew.  The fat was delicate and melt in the mouth, no unpleasant greasiness, and the meat was the most tender pig (well adult pig anyway - the 3 week old suckling piglet in Peru still had it beat) I've ever eaten.  I can't recommend it enough. 

Here it is in all its glory too, not quite the uniform colour of the original but still quite a nice looking centrepiece for a meal I think.

Pork and Vegetable Dumplings

I love dim sum, whether it's early in the day as it should be or in the evening English style I don't care.  The mass of textures and flavours, all wrapped up in little bite-size morsels is perfect for a man that can never decide exactly what he wants to eat.

A while back I photographed a dinner of kangkong belacan which contained a few shop bought  pork dumplings.  Although I do tend to buy them frozen they are reasonably simple (if not a tad time consuming - hence the buying frozen) to make at home using supermarket ingredients.  This weekend I decided to give them a go again to see if I still had it in me.  The recipe I chose to adapt came from a Keith Floyd book which has graced this blog before.

British Delights

Making the assumption that folk visit this site, have a read and then come back again to read newer posts you may have noticed that I’ve not written about any food from England. This is for the simple fact that I don’t really cook a lot of recipes from England. I’ll always buy British produce, if the option is available, but the food will tend to end up in a foreign dish. It’s not that I have anything against the traditional food of this country, it’s just a love of variety and with near 200 countries’ worth of recipes to choose from English dishes aren’t going to pop up too frequently. Toad in the hole gets cooked occasionally and I adore a fried breakfast but outside of that we’re talking the occasional stew or roast really. Maybe I should up the amount of local recipes I cook and stick them on here, for the moment though I shall break from the norm once and cook something from these shores.

Every now and again I hear of Staffordshire Oatcakes and every time I do I think ‘I must give those a go’. I never do though. Last week I was reading this post on the UK Food Blogger’s Association and it was enough to make me finally give them a go, I imagine this author’s success was due to this being the first time I’d actually seen a photo of them.

 

I grabbed a recipe from a lady called Rose and stocked up on the ingredients ready for the weekend.

 

A Trip Down Memory Lane

There seems to be a definite oriental bias to my blog. Then again it is my blog and my diet has a definite oriental bias so I suppose it’s how it should be. This post is going to exacerbate that bias too. The first Chinese cookbook I remember reading was Chinese Cookery by Ken Hom. I must’ve only been about 12 when my mum got a copy but I used to read it loads and was fascinated by the recipes inside. Anglicised they may be but they were still quite out the ordinary compared to anything I ate at home at the time.

As I’ve probably mentioned before I was lucky as a child in that my parents bought a wide variety of foreign food, either abroad (no Spanish fish and chips for us), for the dining table or during a trip to the Chinese or Indian restaurant or the local kebab shop. One favourite dish of the time was crispy aromatic duck and I used to love reading the recipe in the Ken Hom book. Two things that stick in my mind are the blowing up of the duck with a bicycle pump to separate the skin from the flesh, Heston’s 20 years too late, and the oiling and pressing together of two lumps of dough before rolling out the pancakes so you could then separate them and have something half the thickness. Genius.

Well last night I finally got around to trying one of them when I made Muu Shu Pork. Yep, sorry folks, I’m talking about rolling out pancakes and not making Peking Duck.

I got some pork out the freezer on Sunday but then changed my mind and cooked that tofu dish of the previous post. I thought about what I had at home that could do with using up and the nearly full bag of lily buds sprang to mind. I’d bought these weird yellow things for hot and sour soup but using them maybe 10 at a time meant the bag went down rather slowly. Googling around I came across a recipe for Muu Shu pork that, rather helpfully, called for a whole ¼ cup of them along with some cloud ear mushrooms that I also had lying around. Muu Shu pork is something that folk on American TV shows seem to order all the time but I’ve never actually seen it in the UK, the perfect reason to give it a go.

The recipe I used is here  and the recipe for the pancakes here.

For the pancakes I used Dove's Organic white bread flour and took note of the tortilla press tip and gave the Christmas present from my mum its first use. It worked OK but I did give each a final roll with a rolling pin just to get them a little thinner. I won’t say they were the roundest pancakes I’ve ever eaten but they did the job and tasted great. Like light and soft tortillas. After frying I wasn’t sure they were properly cooked so I gave them a steaming to finish off whilst I was cooking the pork. Taking a tip from the duck and pancakes you see over here I added a little hoisin to each and to get some of my 5 a day I had some Chinese greens (not sure which ones they were) with oyster sauce.

This was another definite keeper too - so two in two days.