FT's Dodgy Chinese Pork Butt

[FrenchTart]

Before you ask...Yes, that was the best name I could come up with...

This will be a two part post. First part will be today with ingredients and prep. Second part will be tomorrow after 24 hours of marinade.

This recipe basically recreates something between black bean and a hoisin Chinese takeaway food. I just made it up on the fly and although the primary ingredient is a hoisin marinade the end result tastes quite different due to the method of cooking and all the other lovely ingredients

First off, you will need to round up the ingredients below. The meal doesn't need to contain pork but whatever meat you choose it needs to be one that is suitable for slow cooking. This is good news as it generally means cheaper cuts are what we want.

1.5KG pork shoulder "pork butt"
1 big bag o' peppers
2 small onions
2 cloves of garlic
1 medium bottle of hoisin sauce
juice of one lemon (or be lazy, like me)
tablespoon of honey (or heaped teaspoon of brown sugar)
rice (forgot this for the photo, sorry)

The ingredients on the plate are:
2 teaspoons dried coriander leaf (top left)
2 teaspoons chilli flakes (top right)
1 heaped teaspoon sea salt (bottom)
1 heaped teaspoon fermented black beans (the stuff that is "not rabbit droppings, honest" in the middle)

The fermented black beans are not absolutely required but they do add a really nice background flavour to the meal.

Next up, remove the pork skin and dice the meat up into large chunks. It really doesn't matter if you end up leaving some fat on here as we will be slow-cooking this for a good couple of hours.

Once this is done we prepare our baking tray by creating a 'nest' of tinfoil in the bottom of the tray. You'll need enough additional tinfoil in this piece to be able to wrap around the meat completely.

Now add the meat to the baking tray and the following ingredients:

hoisin
lemon juice
honey/sugar
coriander leaf
chilli flakes
sea salt
fermented black beans

Mix it all up thoroughly...

Then wrap the tinfoil around the meat so that it is as sealed in as possible. After this place an additional tinfoil sheet over the top of the baking tray and seal it once more. The idea here is to ensure that no moisture escapes at all during the cooking process - we want to keep the meat moist and have lots of lovely juices at the end to add to our dish.

And that's it for today. I'll be leaving this overnight to marinade (not absolutely needed but it does add a bit to the dish). Check back tomorrow for the second part of the recipe

 

[FrenchTart]

And...we're back.

Straight away we need to stick the pork in the oven at 160C. The pork will need to cook for at least 2 hours, ideally 3.

Meanwhile, 30 mins before cooking you should put the rice on to cook and then chop the remaining ingredients as so:

You'll notice that I've also slivered up some spring onions. I forgot to include those at the start, sorry...though they aren't really required anyhow.

Now we need to get one (or two if you want to make things easier) woks/pans to super high heat. Use peanut oil or similar for this. Once it is smoking hot, throw in just the peppers.

The idea here is to sear the peppers to get a bit of blackened skin. After a minute or two of this we add the onions (normal, not spring). Fry for a minute, then add the garlic and fry for another minute.

Now turn the heat down and take the pork out of the oven. It won't look amazingly appetising but it will taste and smell delicious

Now tip the pork and all the juice into the pan:

Mix and cook for a few minutes before serving on a bed of rice. Add some spring onion on top to garnish and give it a bit of crunch:

According to the four people this food served it was absolutely delicious. Let me know how you get on with it

 

[FrenchTart]

Part 2 added

Apologies for the poor photography btw.

 

[FrenchTart]

How do you stop the garlic burning and going bitter when you add it to a smoking hot pan?

Looks great btw.

It tends to have cooled down quite a bit by the time you add the garlic

 

[FrenchTart]

Good work, looks lovely. Certainly bookmarked for later use.

Awesome. If you do get round to making this please do let me know how it goes

Doing this tomorrow night. Thanks FT! Will post pictures.

Great. I look forward to hearing about it

 

[FrenchTart]

Will only marinade for half a day though! Look forward to it though!

I've made it before without any marinading period. If anything, slow cooking it for longer (for example, the half a day you're talking about) would probably get nicer results. You may want to drop the temp to something more like 80C if you cook it for more than 6 hours though.

 

[FrenchTart]

100º for four hours?

I'd go for ~140. As long as the pork is well covered/sealed (as I posted above about the tinfoil) it'll be fine

If it was a leaner cut you'd have to be more careful about it but as it's pork shoulder you can get away with a lot.

 

[FrenchTart]

I think it's unlikely that Tesco will have black beans ever to be honest. Unfortunate /re the hoisin though. You could substitue some kind of bbq sauce with some extra chinese five spice and garlic though.