Lap yuk - Chinese air dried bacon

I've had a months' sabbatical from SDON having become a bit unmotivated with blogging. Hopefully I'm now suitably refreshed and ready to get back into the swing of things. The most interesting thing I've made recently has been lap yuk - air dried Chinese bacon.

First up props to the original source: Sunflower Food Galore, one of my favourite food blogs. If you want loads of interesting East Asian and specifically Chinese recipes head over. The archives are a gold mine.

Sunflower's lap yuk recipe can be found here - I followed it more or less to the letter so I won't bother repeating it all.

This is a very easy first step into the world of curing meats, a world which may seem intimidating at first. The only specialist ingredient is Prague powder (also known as Instacure or curing salt or pink salt). The key thing to note is that there are actually two Prague powders/Instacures/pink salts - Number 1 always contains 93.75% table salt (sodium chloride) and 6.25% sodium nitrite. Number 2 always contains 89.75% table salt, 6.25% sodium nitrite and 4% of the slower acting sodium nitrate. Number 1 is used for fresh sausages and Number 2 for air dried sausages as well as whole meat products like this bacon or the Italian coppa.

The sodium nitrate and nitrate helps cure the meat, preserves pink colours in certain things and discourages dangerous bacteria including that responsible for botulism. Neither versions are expensive and can be easily obtained on Ebay or Amazon. Safety warning - in large amounts they are toxic so be careful with amounts in recipes and don't let any kids near them!

Right, with that out the way here is what you are going to need (cribbed from Sunflower).

• 1.75 - 2 kg belly pork
• 1/2 cup of light soy
• 1 tbsp dark soy
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 2.5 tbsp salt
• 1 tsp five spice
• 2 tsp crushed Sichuan peppercorns
• 1/3 cup Shaoshing wine
• 5g #2 cure salt (Prague #2 or insta cure #2)

Get your butcher to cut the pork belly into long thick strips. Mix all the other ingredients together to make a marinade (shown up top). I added a few chillies too. Put the meat in a sealed bag with the liquid.

Keep the bacon in the fridge for three or four days and turn once or twice per day so all areas are exposed to the wicked flavours.

Remove the meat, put some string through the end and hang up somewhere with a slight breeze. My long suffering co-habitees let me use our curtain rail.

These two photos were taken after a couple of days of hanging. You can clearly see the meat has lost some mass (in the form of moisture). It's also darkened a lot. That's the result of both the wet cure in the fridge with the salt and sodium nitrate/nitrite and the gradual air drying.

context shot of location

Sunflower recommends a week's drying. My bacon is seen in cross-section below and I've got to say was (is) bloody tasty. Big success this one. I've only had lap yuk a couple of times - most memorably in an excellent stir-fry at Gourmet San with leek and crispy tofu - but the taste of this was absolutely spot on. It's got an extremely strong flavour - salty, fatty but most of all muskily meaty, with the warmth and perfume of the spices coming through at the end.

Hold tight for some recipes involving the bacon. I've found it most straightforward to use as lardons or slices in stir-frys. I chop the bacon and fry it first before adding chilli pastes, garlic etc. This allows some of the fat to render out and subsequently coat the stir-fry, and also the chance for the fat to crisp up a little. The skin is pretty chewy, I think it's fine to remove it if it's not too your taste. From a bit of googling I'd guess that steaming the bacon is the most popular and traditional means of cooking, however I'm very fond of frying it to obtain some crispiness.

As a first go at curing meat lap yuk was a highly satisfying experience. Easy and very rewarding, I've got my hands on a copy of Charcuterie and an old school meat mincer for sausage making so watch this space.

PS
A few thoughts:

• Make sure you get the pork belly end without the ribs in. Most of mine was boneless but it had mini cartilaginous proto-ribs at one one as you can see above (the two central white circles).
• Check the bacon after five or six days drying as mine was very hard after seven.
• It's a strong tasting and robust kind of thing, so don't worry too much about exact details!

Torn bread & lamb soup (yang rou pao mo - 羊肉泡饃)

As with the recent pork tacos, my interest is often piqued by recipes on blogs. Having had a bash at Xinjiang's signature dish Da Pan Ji I thought this soup on the excellent Sunflower Food Galore blog looked like another good idea in terms of that area's cuisine. However, upon reading more closely I realised it is from Xian and not Xinjiang. A totally different part of the country. What fooled me was the lamb and flat-bread, usually associated with the bit of China bordering the central Asian states. I need to investigate fully. 

Anyhow, it appealed. An aromatic lamb stock + torn bread  + some extras is a great combination that recalls other classic bread using soups such as ribollita. Why waste stale bread when you can make it in to wicked soup?

wood-ears and lilly buds

So, I won't repeat the recipe as it's in the original link. First you need to make the stock. I used lamb scrag for cheapness and savour. The stock is flavoured with the staples of Chinese broths - cooking wine, ginger, spring-onions, fennel seeds, star anise, cassia and false (or Chinese) cardamom (chao guo). It's a similar mix to that which flavoured my sour fish soup and partridge congee. It'll need a good 2 hours +. Remove the bones, pick them over and reserve the meat.

The stock may look rather disagreeable whilst bubbling away, coloured as it is by weird scum from the lamb bones. Once it is strained (muslin is pretty much essential here I'm afraid) it becomes much more attractive.

before

 during

 after

Next you need to get everything ready to add to the stock. For my sins I went for pittas over the home-made bread option. Wood ears (which resemble human skin quite creepily) and lily buds need a soak. Lilly buds were new on me (available at the super, and ever dependable Yu Xiao in Dalston) and have a nice, mild flavour and pleasing, giving texture.

Chop you bread into bits and chop some spring onion and garlic. When the stock is ready add the bread, chopped wood ear, spring onion, a little garlic and the lily buds. Flavour the stock with some light soy sauce, cooking wine and Chinkiang vinegar. When the garlic has lost some rawness add the last parts - the lamb pieces, coriander, chilli oil and seasame oil to taste. Serve.

This soup has a lot going on for it. The bread is amazing, slowly moving from crisp, through pliable and limp into mushy territory. All enjoyable states for soup based bread I think. The scrag meat is incredible tender and flavoursome. However, I'm not sure I quite nailed the stock. It was nice but not exactly bursting with flavour so I think next time I'll cook the bones for longer and maybe at a slightly higher temperature.

Congee Mk 2 - aromatic lamb

After my first attempt at congee I fancied another go to try and perfect the texture and thickness, this time with a rich lamb stock with lots of aromatic spices in. This amount served four. Some interesting history.

Ingredients

• half a scrag end of lamb, sliced
• one onion and one head garlic, cleaved in twain
• chilli, cloves, star anise, peppercorns, cinnamon and coriander seed
• two scant handfuls of rice
• medium chopped root vegetables, any veg lying around
• soy and fish sauce
  

First make the stock: brown the lamb, onion and garlic. If you are bothering to brown meat pre-stewing then you need to get plenty of colour on the meat to get the malliard reaction going. I read about scorching onions and garlic before going in the stockpot and, er, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Not sure it led to any extra flavour in the congee but it's not going to do any harm if you have the pan going already for the meat.

When it's done add to a pan of cold water along with the dry spices. Aromatic and a mite of heat is the way to go here I feel. Simmer for 1.5 hours. Take the sliced scrag out, cool and remove the meat from the bone. Strain the stock and return to pan. Squeeze the cooked garlic back into the soup, chop the cooked onion and return that also. Add the rice to the stock and put the bones back in to ensure max flavour extraction. When the rice is getting really soft and starting to break down (this seems to take ages) add the other veg (I used carrot, parsnip (sweetness worked really well) and baby leeks) and cook till everything is done. Remove the bones, put the shredded meat back in and then when everything is hot add a shot of fish sauce (nam pla) and two shakes of soy.

Rubbish pic of finished article

Hmm, still not nailed the rice cooking part. Nowhere near. This congee had discernible rice grains in it, albeit visibly disintegrating ones. Some of the photos on the net show a cloudy stock and almost jellied consistency with no individual grains of rice left. Am I using the wrong rice? I just used an easy-cook one I had in store. Still, it was tasty and warming soup. Scrag end definitely seems reminiscent of oxtail in mouthfeel and levels of fat, collagen and gelatine. So I guess I'll carry on - keen, green congee dilettante - in looking for the perfect mix!

Teochow braised duck

I don't know about you but I find I turn to blogs as much as cookbooks when looking for recipes these days. People odd enough to bother setting up a blog dedicated to food are clearly carrying out a labour of love and this is usually apparent in the writing. They also tend often to furnish the recipe with excellent photos - just flicking though Google reader or the like grants access to an enormous, international, multi-authored, open-source cookbook personalised by the stars or bookmarks you have added.

So when I had a duck in the fridge (half price at Co-op, sweet) I had a little dip and came up with Teochow braised duck. The other idea was Fergus Henderson's wonderful (and extremely simple) duck with carrots. I'm gonna do that again next time I guess. For the Teochow braise I liked the idea of putting the ingredients and a pot and basically leaving them for an hour half to relax and simmer away. All I had to pick up on the cycle home (another benefit of the bike - stopping for crucial foodstuffs mid-commute!) was some lemongrass and I was set.

The ingredients are listed in the original post so I won't replicate them: I was fastidious is my following and added only a single chilli as I couldn't bear the thought of all those fine spices within a tiny bit of heat.

After an hour-and-a-half the duck was tender and I removed it to a frying pan to  crisp up the skin while the thin sauce was reduced a little and had some mushrooms added. We ate the heart and liver fried for starters and then the duck with the sauce and some pickled vegetables as suggested in the original link. Unfortunately the rice was that cloudily translucent easy-cook type which went a bit Uncle Ben when cooked and not the proper regal white stuff. The sauce was pretty good, the star anise goes very well with a dash of sweet soy I put in. Not mind blowing though.

I'm sometimes a little scared of poaching or braising birds but this came out wonderfully tender. The fat all rendered out and the finished article was not particularly greasy. I now have a cup of duck fat in the fridge and a bag of potatoes in the cupboard begging me to fry them in it.

The stock from the carcass was deep & ducky on a profound & infrequently achieved level

Congee Mk 1

 

I've wanted to cook congee for a while and finding myself still suffering under the tail of a hangover one day at 6pm a bowl of rice cooked in a single pot sounded like a good idea. There was no proper stock involved in the making of this congee nor is it remotely authentic I expect.

Ingredients

• three cups of rice
• shrimp satay sauce, nam pla, garlic, ginger, dried shrimp, sweet soy sauce
• peas, kale, bamboo shoots, spring onions
• sausages

Two to three cups of easy-cook rice I mixed with about twenty cups worth of water and simmered until the grains start to break down and loose their individual structural integrity. I included some ginger and garlic from the starts, thinking they too would break down in the long cook and give some nice background flavours. Having never cooked congee before I wasn't sure of how long they rice would need and man it does need quite a while! You could still see the grains in mine by the end, held in a starchy matrix, but some pics seem to show the grain totally broken down to a paste.

In lieu of stock proper I added some sweet soy, hot shrimp satay sauce, nam pla and a pinch of veg bouillon. After a good hour and a half I chucked in the other things according to cooking times. Some sausages needed eating up so popped out of their skins and fried they made excellent meat balls. Bamboo shoots had the texture of artichokes in brine and a slightly nondescript or almost mildly fishy taste. When everything looks done serve with some deep fried shallots on top.

Hearty

What a wonderful food. I guess that lots of Asian countries have their own versions of congee and it's not hard to see why - a modest amount of staple grain can be eked out a long way and flavoured with what ever is to hand. It's not far from risotto or paella though the UK doesn't really have a soup/stew based on a grain I can think of. A good chance to mess around then perhaps, and do a suitably patriotic British version.

Okra with coconut rice

Plenty keeps on giving. Okra with coconut rice looked just the part for the grizzly weather and early dark. It's a fairly simple recipe - you make a sambal paste and fry it, add cooked okra and serve with coconut rice. That's it.

For the sambal - plenty of red shallots, fresh red chilli (I used the long Indian ones that are available pretty widely) salt and a touch of garlic enter the magimix for a spin. The cook is also instructed to add 'dried red chilli' which I found a bit of a vague description, chillies varying so hugely as they do. In the end I went for what seemed like a sensible amount and added a couple of small hot ones and a large long Mexican type one I had in store. Once blitzed the paste is fried.

It slowly browns as the shallots cook and begins to smell very savoury. After ten minutes tamarind water (just sticky tamarind from a block soaked in boiling water) and sugar are added and that's the paste done.

Meantime, make the coconut rice. This is just basmati rice cooked with coconut, ginger slices and lime leaves. When the rice is cooking cook the okra for a minute or two until just done but not slimy. Ottolenghi suggests using small Egyptian okra and I followed his suggestion by getting a frozen pack which had already been trimmed. To make the food go a bit further I added squash here too which worked well and provided variety. When everything is nearly ready combine and that's it! Put fried shallots, lime, chopped coriander and (my suggestion) nam pla on the table to spruce things up.

It's a cracker. Be liberal with the extra bits at the end as it needs that extra poke in the bottom to really shine.