Land of Plenty – Red-Cooked Pork (Hongshao Rou)

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post (dry fried chicken) in the Land of Plenty series, but don’t read into that too much – I’m not giving up. I won’t be traveling as much the next few weeks so I’ll have no excuse for getting more Sichuan done in the kitchen. I already have a great looking short rib recipe lined up, and the first of the two Sichuan challengers emailed me their results from the kitchen, so I’ll post that soon.

Today’s post, Red-Cooked Pork, is from a different Fuchsia Dunlop cookbook (Revolutionary Chinese), but there is a red pork belly recipe in the Land of Plenty cookbook that looks to be the same thing. I found this recipe on the Appetite for China website, which has fantastic Chinese recipes and amazing photos.

I had a nice slab of bacon that was given to me (shout out to Liz!) which you are instructed to boil for a few minutes to partially cook the pork – the photo below is post plunge.

While that was boiling I got the spices together – star anise, sliced ginger, cassia bark (cinnamon bark), and red chiles.

Slice up the bacon – the recipe calls for cubes but I went with more of a rectangle shape.

First you heat sugar and oil over low heat to let the sugar melt, then add the pork and the Shaoxing rice wine.

Then add enough water to cover all the pork and add all your spices, bring to a boil, then simmer.

Below is after ~ 30 minutes.

This is after almost an hour. Turn up the heat and the sauce will start to quickly thicken. As soon as it’s very thick, splash in your soy sauce, stir, and you are ready to plate.

My plating/photos doesn’t even compare to the Appetite for China photos, but the taste was surely as good, because this tasted incredible. The salty/savory/sweet/heat combo was in full effect. It wasn’t overly spicy, but the star anise and chiles did add enough to counteract the rest of the flavors. There is of course large amounts of fat, but I couldn’t resist eating it all, sometimes savoring the fat for a few moments on my tongue before chewing.

One out of one terra cotta soldiers agree.