Malinda Lo

Last week I decided to try, again, to recreate my mom’s hongshao rou, or red-cooked pork. (I’ve written about previous attempts here.)

To do so, I googled “hongshao rou” and “red-cooked pork” (the literal translation of the Chinese phrase) to see what other people had done. Most of the recipes did not resemble the one my mom makes. It wasn’t until I googled “red-cooked beef,” remembering that my mom sometimes uses beef, that I came across a recipe that looked like hers.

I decided to go with this one — but with a few modifications. I used pork instead of beef, potatoes instead of turnip, and omitted the tangerine peel recommended because I didn’t have any. I also had previously made my own chicken-and-pork stock the week before, so I used that. (I don’t usually do this, but I was at the local Chinese supermarket and pork and chicken bones were super cheap, so I bought them.) Here are the raw ingredients:

Dark soy sauce, shaoxing wine, pork, spices (fennel seed, star anise, dried chili pepper, cinnamon stick, ginger)

Potatoes and carrots

The recipe calls for parboiling the meat first, but my mom never did that (I don’t think) so I just browned it until the liquid burned off. Then I added all the other ingredients except for the potatoes and carrots and let it simmer for one hour. At this point I added in the veggies and let it cook until the potatoes were very soft.

Into the pot!

Here it is off the stove:

Almost just like Mom used to make!

I also stir-fried some green beans to eat alongside.

Green beans in the wok with some garlic

The green beans were very simple but absolutely delicious. First I heated up some oil in the wok, then added a few whole smashed garlic cloves before tipping in the green beans. It was very loud! I stir-fried them for a little, then splashed in some shaoxing wine around the edges, sprinkled some water on top, and put on the lid while turning down the heat a bit. This lets the beans steam a little. At the end I added salt, white pepper, and some oyster sauce. Very, very good.

Here’s the whole meal:

Chinese home cooking

I was sooo satisfied with this meal! It was seriously almost exactly like my mom used to make. I could hardly believe it.

There was one difference though: the hongshao rou was quite a bit soupier than I anticipated. I think I just added too much stock. However, the liquid was so tasty that it reminded me of beef or pork noodle soup! So later on, I used the leftovers to make noodle soup, and it was seriously awesome.

Next time, I’ll either add less stock so that the hongshao rou is less soupy, or just make it into a big soup to use for noodles. I can’t wait!