Chinese Red Braised Pork (红烧肉)

Red braised pork is a classic of classics in authentic Chinese cuisine, and it hails from somewhere in Southern mainland China.  Nobody knows for sure where it originated, but legend has it that the founder of the current Chinese government, Mao Zedong, demanded that chefs in the capital--all the way up in Northern China--be able to make this dish in the style of his Southern home province, Hunan.  (And when your dictator makes demands of you, you probably want to comply.)

I wanted to make this dish because 1) I have been craving pork belly lately, and 2) being a foodie from Southern China, this is a good dish to have under my belt.  For my first try, I think it turned out pretty well, with a few personal critiques.

The meat was a great consistency and the fat almost melted on the tongue.  The skin was very soft after the dish was done, and I thought the color was pretty spot on.  In terms of flavor, notes of sweet, salty, and savory all combined into a nice little package due to brown sugar, two types of soy sauce, a bottle of American lager, and some spices (minced garlic and star anise).  I ultimately enjoyed the dish, although there were three enhancements with which I would like to experiment next time.

1. How to make the dish slightly more red than brown.  Some suggestions I have heard include increasing the alcohol to soy sauce ratio, melting the brown sugar on lower heat and for a longer time period to allow for greater caramelization, and trying red wine instead of an American lager.
2. How to make the fat melt more easily on the tongue while making the skin more chewy (personal preference).  This one is a tough conundrum that I may not be able to solve so easily.
3. Starting off with less cooking oil, the final product will probably be less oily, containing only the natural oils of the pork belly.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the results, although I would love to get feedback from a connoisseur of fine Chinese dining from mainland China.  To make this dish, I cobbled together this recipe on Shanghai-style braised pork, my mother's recipe, suggestions from friends, and a few things I thought made sense.

Here is how this dish differed from the linked recipe:

1. When blanching the pork, I added four medium chunks of ginger to aid with removing pork's pungent stench.
2. I used brown sugar instead of regular sugar or rock sugar.
3. Minced garlic (5-6 cloves) and two small chunks of star anise were added spices.
4. Instead of Chinese cooking wine, I used an entire bottle of lager sitting in my fridge.

Youkoso Daikaya!

Painted in large characters on a ceiling panel near the back wall, the title of this piece is borrowed from just one of many aesthetics that adorn the small interior space of Daikaya.  The phrase is a warm welcome to all guests who come in to slurp up some heartwarming Sapporo style ramen.  Pictured below is their mugi-miso bowl with an extra sheet of (wakame) seaweed and three chunks of special-of-the-day pork belly.

Daikaya is, at the moment, my favorite ramen joint in the metropolitan DC area for three reasons (in no particular order).

1. Distance - they are the closest to my home in Northern Virginia.
2. Broth - each of their five broths, including a vegetarian variety, offer deep flavors and full bodies.  While all their broths are put together in Sapporo style, each broth is distinct in inspiration and flavor, almost as if they were five brothers and sisters from the same family.  For me, that means five trips to Daikaya is the bare minimum.
3. Noodles - their noodles have the best consistency that I have tasted in this area.  They are just springy enough without being hard, and they easily pick up the flavor of the broth as you slurp.

In the last two weeks, I have managed to visit Daikaya twice, which is a much higher visit count than normal for me.  Since I have known about Daikaya for almost two years now (probably) and have not yet written about it on my blog, what better time than now?  The second bowl shown below is their spicy miso bowl with a soft-boiled egg, an extra sheet of wakame (seaweed), and extra char siu (slices of Japanese-style roast pork) buried in the broth.

On one of these trips, I also got to sit at the bar and watch the chefs ply their trade.

18 Reasons Why I Adore My Cultural Cuisine

On this blog nearly nine months ago, I set out to document adventures with, thoughts on, and experiences in food.  I put up quite a few posts in the initial months before trailing off.  Here are some of the things in the last seven to eight months that never quite made it to the blog, though I think they are still worthy of mentioning.  If you have some affinity for Chinese food and are in need of stimulating your appetite, this is for you.  Enjoy!

Creative steamed bread (馒头) my mother made.

My mother's steamed bread is usually pretty tasty, and with these she decided to up the game by making cute designs.  There are little piggies, daisy flower designs, rose flower designs, fun swirls, and other appetizing breads.

  

Homemade Lamb Dumplings!

Back when I went on a weekly dumpling-making craze, I tried a lamb filling one week, and it was a huge success.  Looking as I may need to go back on a dumpling-making craze soon due to financial reasons, I am really looking forward to more experiments.

Autumn Stir-Fry Medley

A colorful autumn stir-fry medley I made a few months ago that included lamb, zucchini, red bell peppers, orange bell peppers, and onions.  In this photo, it had been refrigerated overnight and reheated in a microwave so some of the color has degraded, but it was still tasty!

Siopao From Southeast Asia

A while back, I got together with friends for drinks, merriment, and making siopao.  Siopao, a named derived from Hokkien, was a new experience for me because it is a Southeast Asian take on the very prevalent Asian steamed bun.  We made it together from scratch: dough, filling, and all, even starting from a slab of pork shoulder instead of ground pork!  Pretty proud to have been part of the tasty end product.

Longan (龙眼) or Dragon Eyes, One of my Favorite Fruits

In America, fruit triples as a refreshing snack, a great source of sugary drinks, and a moniker used in juvenile shaming rituals.  In China, people name their fruits after the eyes of dragons.

Asian Eggplant Pork Stir-fry

Eggplants are one of the most versatile vegetables out there, to say nothing specific of the long Asian variety.  Here, I made a simple stir-fry with ground pork, ginger, green onions, and a little cooking wine.

Mai Style Homemade Ramen

My friend Mai made some ramen noodles from scratch and put it together in a bowl of well-prepared vegetables, soup stock, and beef stewed overnight.  The flavor was top notch, and my only complaint was that the noodles were cooked longer than preferred, which we discussed over dinner.

Pho Sate

Yes, another Asian noodle soup, this time from the Southeast.  I ventured to Pho Sate based on a friend's recommendation for their sauce, and the sauce did not disappoint.  The soup was flavorful although the cuts of meat were lacking in comparison to my favorite NOVA/DC joint, Pho 75.

Salmon Steak with Snow Peas Dinner

One of the simple preparations my mother taught me when I was first learning to make food without burning down a building was baked salmon steak.  Here, the salmon has been marinated with honey, ginger powder, coriander, paprika, old bay, dried parsley flakes, and a touch of Montreal steak seasoning.  The snow peas are simply stir-fried with garlic and a light sprinkling of salt.

Steamed Pork Belly Rice Cake (粉蒸肉)

This was a neat salivation-inducing cake the neighbors brought over for Thanksgiving dinner at my parents' home.  It is a cake made from rice and pork belly marinated overnight in a special sauce and then steamed in its cake form with carrots, mangoes, and a few spices.  I may have to try making it in the future!

Hearty Steamed Bread (馒头) To Go

This is a special steamed bread my mom experimented with over Christmas and New Years where she combined wheat germ, almond meal, cashew meal, corn meal, and ground chestnut into the dough, making for an extremely hearty bread bun that I would totally carry with me on a hiking trip.  This beats trail mix or granola bars any day in my book.

Miso-Glazed Eggplant Round 145

This is actually a returning guest from a past dish I tried to make, matcha infused rice with miso-glazed eggplants, inspired by Blue Apron.  By the elongated shape, you can tell these are Asian eggplants, and they are so good that I have made these again and again on nights when I am in need of an easy dinner.

Fresh Shiitake Mushrooms

This is not a dish in itself; rather it is clearly a raw ingredient.  But I wanted to include these because of my boundless love for mushrooms.  There are so many different mushrooms and fungi that have found their way into cultural cuisines all over the world, and it makes me happy to know that there is a whole world to be explored in food based on fungi.  One of my favorites so far is wild mushroom hotpot from Yunnan province in China.

Taiwanese Shortcakes

The world of Asian snacks is also a vast world with many hidden gems as well as many duds.  One of those gems lacking a proper English name better than "shortcake" probably originated in Taiwan.  The most common variety are made from a pineapple paste, but as you can see below, there are also cakes with melon-flavored paste, mango-flavored paste, and green-tea flavored paste.  So much goodness.

Siam Cafe in Downtown Cleveland

While visiting my parents recently, my mother took us out to Siam Cafe, which is an old favorite of mine in the Cleveland area.  One of the cool things about there not being as many Chinese folks or authentic Chinese restaurants in the Midwest is that the Chinese communities are a little more close-knit.  Case in point: I found out my mother is a friend of the manager/owner of this place, in addition to the other Chinese restaurant owners with whom I know she is friends.  Pictured below is lobster, hot iron beef, and a tofu-vegetable medley, Chinese style.  Not pictured: we also ordered frog that day.

Homemade Lamb and Tomato Sauce with Rice

I was feeling lazy recently and decided to make a home-made meat sauce with ground lamb, tomatoes, and green onions.  Below is the end result served with rice in the style of a Japanese curry.

Chinese Home Fried Rice

Every Asian culture and every household has their own preparation of fried rice.  I made the one pictured below in a large batch when I found myself needing to feed one of my brothers who visited me for a few days.  This rice contains bits of scrambled egg, beef, zucchini, carrot, and green onions.

Chinese Soup Mochi

I have no idea where mochi originally came from, but to my knowledge, all three Northeastern Asian cultures (Korea, Japan, China) have their own version of it.  A traditional Chinese preparation for mochi is to cook it in scented water or sweet rice wine as a light, palate-cleansing, soothing dessert.  When using scented water, I have typically had mochi in ginger water, so it was a pleasant new experience for me when my mother brought back sweet osmanthus (桂花) flowers from China for scenting the water.

 

If you read through all of that, I hope you enjoyed it and are now one-step closer to ravenous desire for some amazing Chinese food!

Kogiya: Limited Options but a Lot of Heart

Best word(s) to describe barbecue at Kogiya: fatty, fatty, fatty.  How fatty?  See photo:

Kogiya is touted as one of Northern Virginia's finest in Korean BBQ, and who am I to disagree?  Kogiya gives you two great all-you-can-eat selections!  Plus, 1) I have no idea how a Korean foodie would think Korean BBQ should be and 2) I have only had it twice in this area and no more times in my life than I can count on both hands.  In contrast, I submit my experience with Chinese food.

So with this caveat, I judge Kogiya to be "extremely" two things: tasty and limited in options.  Kogiya does a great job with taste because they prepare their marinated meats with phenomenal flavor.  Of course, it helps when the only cuts of meat you serve on the grill are the fattiest cuts, but that is not a demerit on taste.  That is, however, illuminating with regard to the breadth of Kogiya's options, or lack thereof.  With option A, you get unlimited quantities of five types of meat, of which only chicken is "lean."  The other four option A selections are fatty beef brisket, three-layer pork belly, miso pork belly, and spicy pork belly.  With option B, you get to tack on small intestine, large intestine, and tripe.  So in two words: deliciously fatty.

From a business standpoint, I thought this makes a lot of sense because these all-you-can-eat options easily stand at the intersection between customer satisfaction and satiating even the most voracious appetites with a "less is more" approach.  Of course the fattiest cuts are going to be the tastiest morsels sizzling on a grill, so why not load up on just those cuts to the pure delight of every dinner guest?  And let's be honest, folks eating out at KBBQ are giving themselves a freebie on any sort of diet.  With respect to the "less is more" approach, what better meat is there to fill up bellies quickly than the fattiest, richest cuts?  Lean meat just would not do the same job as three-layer pork belly.

What did I order?  Option A, because while I love tripe, I am not a huge fan of intestine, small or large.  The meal was more than satisfying, and I recommend it to anybody looking for a change of pace in Northern Virginia outside of Honey Pig.  Which would I pick by default if given an option: Honey Pig, because of vastly more choices.

Cakes and Vegetables 5: The Carrots Strike Back

A while back, my family attended a get-together with friends, and my parents asked me to put together a carrot cake for the event.  This time, I used a combination of my mother's food processor and actual stainless steel grater to prepare the carrots, which was a great learning experience.

It turns out that the food processor did not grate when set to "grate," and by the time all the carrot pieces were similar in size, there was only orange mush instead of gratings.  After 1.5 hours spent producing two cups of mashed carrots, the food processor was clearly not a significant improvement over the small plastic grater at my apartment.

On the other hand, the full-sized stainless steel grater worked wonders.  It quickly turned solid carrot into nice gratings in a uniform manner.  This, compared to the little plastic grater at my place, appeared to work miracles.  With extra gratings to spare, I decorated the top with orange "sprinkles" at my mother's suggestion.  These gratings, it turns out, played a key role in appealing to my audience.  Read on to find out why I believe so.

Interesting tidbit: many Chinese people of my parents' generation are practically allergic to added sugar.  That is to say, they probably consume in one week the amount of added sugar that is contained in the average 3-course American meal plus beverage, and only because they avoid added sugar at all cost.  Given these unfounded assumptions, the average Chinese adult would consume 21 times less sugar than his/her American counterpart.

So why is that important in a discussion about carrot cake?  Because I was at an event with many Chinese adults of my parents' generation, and that little tidbit was the one hurdle that would deter them from stuffing their face with risen sugar and butter.  The cool thing was that my mother helped me overcome that hurdle by suggesting I sprinkle extra carrot gratings on top of the buttercream frosting.  My hypothesis on the psychological effect of this action: the cake appeared less likely to induce a heart attack, and a little more likely to provide a great source of beta-carotene straight out of the Earth.

The cake, it turns out, was a huge success, and later, I made the same cake to bring into the office.

IPA Gives Me Wings

I do not remember where it came from...  I do not even know how it got there...  Yet somehow for over a year now, there have been bottles of IPA comically chilling in my refrigerator.  What a shame, I keep on telling myself, since IPAs seem to be all the rage in the American craft beer community.  What a shame, because it is hard to describe the horror I feel when the bottle in my hand touts its "homicidally hoppy" brew as its most redeeming feature.  So you might imagine every bottle remained untouched until this weekend, when I found a use for them: beer soaked chicken wings!! (Because the wings were on sale at the supermarket downstairs.)

I mixed one bottle of Lagunitas IPA with a dash of soy sauce, some lemon juice, and a ton of minced garlic and cilantro.  I marinated the wings in the mixture for 24 hours and then baked both sides of the wings for 30 minutes at 400 F.  I then sauteed the remaining marinade with a little bit of oil (also allowing some water to boil off) and drizzled it over the finished wings.  Review: finger-licking tasty, although next time I will cut out the soy sauce and use a beer-brine marinade.

Longjing, High Performance Truly Delivered

In a startling revelation, I realized today I have become my dad. Case in point: my dad was always sipping on hot loose leaf tea when I was a kid, and I could not understand how he liked that acerbic stuff. Apple juice; now that was my jam.

My, how times have changed.  These days I often find myself craving a strong cup of hot tea that my relatives have gifted me from China. Apple juice? Haven't touched the stuff in months and cannot remember the last time I purchased a bottle.

The stuff picture above is called Longjing (龙井), a variety of green tea literally called "Dragon Well" and renowned throughout China.  I really have not had a hankering for this stuff until recently--this in spite of drinking it on multiple trips to China.  When friends and I happened upon a quaint Chinese tea shop in Georgetown and decided to sit down, the fragrance of this tea had me swooning, and I had to have a canister after that.  To the uninitiated, this stuff is a completely different beast from Matcha, which, it bears remembering, comes from a completely different cultural context.

Shout out to Aunt Xin for getting this for me, even though she will never see this.

Return to Healthy Lunches!

I have been eating out for lunch quite a bit recently, so I decided to pack for tomorrow!  Lunch includes blanched snow pea leaves and baked beef pie.  The beef pie is more of a casserole but I feel bad calling it that considering...well, it is not what an American or European would call a casserole.  Still, it should be good with grated carrots, diced onions, minced green onions, and minced garlic.  Oh yeah, and a little bit of soy sauce, salt, sesame oil, sugar, and fish sauce in order of amount added.  The sugar was probably unnecessary as the carrots probably made the pie more sweet than expected.

It is nothing pretty, but it should taste great.  Here's to healthy lunches again!  Oh, and I kind of feel like a food snob for using the word "blanched," but hey, that's what I did to the snow pea leaves.

Elusive Xiaolongbao (小笼包) Sighted in Georgetown!

By complete coincidence, some friends and I recently stumbled upon a cozy little shop called Shanghai Lounge in Northwestern Washington, D.C.  It is a joint apparently run by a few 20-30 year old Chinese folks and serves quite a few decently prepared foods you certainly would not find at a takeout place.  Although the shop by appearances was hardly screaming Chinese authenticity, foods like cold seaweed salad and properly stir-fried spicy lamb and veggies dotted the menu.  But what truly lit up their repertoire was the single item for which Shanghai is likely best known: Xiaolongbao (小笼包).

In English, it is called anything between Shanghai steamed buns, Shanghai soup buns, and Shanghai dumplings.  Unfortunately, no truly adequate translations exist for this food, but mention any combination of "Shanghai," "bun," and "dumpling" to a foodie familiar with Southern Chinese foods and they will likely rejoice with vivid memories of mouth-watering flavor exploding on bite.

Seemingly smaller analogs of the more ubiquitous Chinese steamed buns, these little guys appear rather unpretentious.  However, just as you would never judge a book by its cover, you would not want to underestimate the xiaolongbao.  They are essentially a pork patty swimming in a hot fatty broth of complex flavors barely sealed inside a thin layer of flour wrapping smaller in circumference than a clementine.  Because of their size, it is tempting to pop them into your mouth like an American happy hour appetizer.  But this would be a painful two-fold mistake.  Taking a Shanghai steamed bun in one bite would cause the hot soup within to scald your tongue even as it delivers ultimate pleasure to your taste buds.  The steamed bun would leave you in pain yet strangely wanting more like a budding masochist only just coming to terms with new-found desires.  The second part of the two-fold mistake would then be complete when you decide that the first time was worth it and you do it again.

A less painful way to eat these steamed buns is to bite a hole in one side and allow the soup to cool.  Then it is typical to suck out the soup and dip the solid portion of the bun in black vinegar (to taste) before chowing down.  I like to approach it a little differently, however.  Instead of consuming the soup separately, I enjoy eating the entire morsel after the soup has cooled, sometimes dipping the bun in a little black vinegar or dolloping a little vinegar into the bun before partaking.

So how does Shanghai Lounge measure up?  Given that I never expected to find this style of Chinese food outside of China, Los Angeles, or New York City, this was a pleasant surprise.  With respect to flavor, it tasted great although I could not compare this to xiaolongbao I had in Shanghai three years ago because it has been too long.  I will say that it was an excellent sign for the food at Shanghai Lounge that four additional customers who preferred to speak fluent Chinese were seated as I dined.

Orange-glazed Strawberry Cheesecake

Visiting my family for the holidays, I was asked a week ago to find a tasty use for the the excess amount of strawberries and oranges which my mother had recently acquired.  Not spending too much time on creative thought, I decided to fall back on what I know and love best, with a twist.  This time, I would put an actual orange into a cheesecake.

Having never baked with fresh oranges as ingredients, the only question on my mind was: how exactly...?  So I did a little research into the parts of oranges that typically make their way into prepared foods.  I learned about orange zest and how orange juice can be used without irrevocably watering down a mixture.  After some time on the Internet, I actually found just the idea I needed.  So with a sharp paring knife and a hand-juicer, I got started extracting the useful bits from an orange.  Zesting, it turns out, was tedious and fun at the same time, not like grating carrots (which was only tedious and no fun).

With this creation, I was actually lucky to have opportunities to put my product to the test with three groups of taste-testers in nearly back-to-back evenings.  So, on vacation and with time to spare, I decided to reach for perfection.  I think I got somewhat close for a journeyman baker.  Read on about my three iterations of strawberry orange cheesecake, with shortbread crust, and topped with orange glaze!

First cake: I thought it looked like a Rorschach inkblot test.  I was told by my first set of taste-testers, friends from high school, that it looked like bacon.

Second cake: Fixing the errors from the first cake, I put the strawberry puree in the center of the cake and cut down on sugar in the orange glaze. (No picture)

Third and final cake: Stepping things up to the next level, I asked my mother for help decorating the top of the cake with fresh cut strawberries in addition to using strawberry puree in the center.  Having used less than half the orange glaze for the previous cakes, I added all of the glaze to this cake by carefully brushing it over the surface, covering the strawberries, and letting it seep into each nook and cranny.

Not Your Typical Beef Soup, an Asian Family Recipe

Two months is how long I went on a blogging hiatus, and boy did that go by quickly.  Toward the end of September, non-blog-related things generally called life got a little crazier; then friends from out of town visited; then I took part in my civic duty to vote in an informed way; and overall, I fell out of the habit of food blogging.

Well, Thanksgiving is coming up, so what better time to get back into writing about food than the best possible holiday for an American foodie (for a moment, hand-wave away the religious, historical, and social contexts of Thanksgiving).

This time, I want to focus on home-made soups.  I am talking about everything made from scratch, nothing from a glass/metal/plastic container except the seasonings.  Certainly none of that over-salted, preservative-laden canned soup or Chicken stock "stuff" sold in supermarkets.  And I am talking about a perennial contender that brews its way into my parents' home every winter.  It does not have a name, but who needs a name when it is a simple family recipe and it tastes amazing.

As with any soup or stew, you start off with your stock.  In my case, Whole Foods was selling really cheap packs of beef bones with marrow, although my parents usually use lamb shanks.  I stewed two pounds of that for two hours and let the soup cool down all the way in the refrigerator in order to remove all of the solidified fat.  Believe me if you do not remember from biology class, marrow is FATTY...notice the fine oily layer floating on top of the stock after the one centimeter thick layer of solidified fat was removed:

And yes, those are dark chunks of marrow from inside the bone floating around in the stock (what restaurants who make their own stock do not show you).  At that point, I stewed the bones for another four hours with hearty chunks of skinned ginger.  The best part about making soup stock like this is that it naturally lends itself toward multitasking: as long as you are mindful that your stove is on and you replenish the water, you will probably not burn down your home.  If dried scallops or tiny prawns are available from the Asian store, chuck a handful of those into the stock for taste.  Since I had neither, I used Asian fermented fish sauce.

Afterward, I removed the bones and then boiled potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage in the soup for an hour, and that was all.  If serving guests not accustomed to ethnic foods, remove the bits of solid bone marrow and add some garnish on top to disguise relatively "weird" ingredients and to make the soup look prettier.

All that said, I am really looking forward to Thanksgiving.  Thursday night, I will be fine wining and dining at my parents' home with family friends.  No promises on pictures being taken before the food mysteriously disappears.