Dinner & 走油焖肉 (Braised Pork Belly)

 
Dinner took a long time today. I started cooking at around 430pm and we only had dinner at 9pm. =)

What we had for dinner today was… the pork belly shown above, steamed egg and some little fried stuffs.

That was dinner. and what i really wanted to share with you guys, is the meat. It was the first time i had cooked it in this manner and it was amazingly good. Fish loved it.

I got the recipe off 阿芳的私房菜. It is called 走油焖肉.

I’m going to share it with you guys today and i had made some changes to the recipe to suit what i had on hand.

Ingredients

Pork Belly – ours was a long strip
4 cloves of Garlic – i would have used more, but i had none left
1 Star Anise

Sauce
1/2 cup Dark Soy Sauce
1/2 tsp Salt
2 tbsp Rock Sugar
2 1/2 cups Water

*Other ingredients i didn’t add
Dried Orange Peel
Red Chilli

Directions

Get a frying pan – preferably something with a lid because the oil spits everywhere!

Fry the pork belly skin side down till golden brown. Then continue to fry on all sides.

After frying, place the fried pork belly into a bowl of water and soak in there for an hour to remove oil. (I didn’t do it for exactly an hour, maybe 45mins)

I used my Korean pot to fry the pork, then removed most of the oil. After water soaking the pork, put it back into the pot, add the garlic, star anise and all the other ingredients for the sauce.

Cook it for 2 hours. I cooked it for slightly longer – around 2 1/2 hours.

Sliced the pork belly up and i did something that was not included in the original recipe.

Fish got me to fry up the slices of pork. So i dry fried them till golden brown.

For the first time, we did not eat our pork belly with the sauce.

Fish came up with a sauce to accompany the pork instead.

*He added onion oil w/ fried onions, chilli powder and dark soy sauce.

It was very good. The meat was not meltingly soft, but it was Q and chewy but not at all tough. The fats were very Q and not squishy and it doesn’t leave your mouth feeling as if you’ve just swallowed oil.

So… this is a definite favourite and i will be making it again and again.

**To make this more educational, i’m going to try to translate what she was saying in her book regarding this sort of cooking method.

走油 is basically frying the pork in oil then submerging in cold water. This causes the meat and fats to become soft yet still able to retain its shape. Soft yet elastic, wobbly in a way. So, it is slightly more troublesome, but yet it makes a real difference to the end product.

I hope you guys really try this because it is amazing! =)

We had a great great dinner!