Chairman Mao's Red-Braised Pork

This recipe was the favorite dish of Mao Zedong - a fact which will no doubt prompt everyone who reads this to run out and buy pork belly immediately. Fuchsia Dunlop, while in Hunan province to research her cookbook on the region's cuisine, was told frequently of the dish's benefits:

"In keeping with traditional Chinese gastronomy, which seeks to make a medical virtue out of every dietary predilection, the people in Mao's home village, Shaoshan, recommend red-braised pork as a health food: 'Men eat it to build their brains,' Chairman Mao's nephew Mao Anping assured me when I met him there a few years ago, 'and ladies to make themselves more beautiful.' His friend and neighbor, the Shaoshan communist party secretary, told me he ate two bowlfuls a day to keep his intellect in shape."

[Excerpt from Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook - Recipes from Hunan Province]

I can't speak to the brain building or beautification properties, but this is a very tasty dish requiring relatively few ingredients.

Your first task is to track down pork belly. A surprisingly difficult thing to do in most standard grocery stores. The local Giant, for example, was quite obviously a no-go. The guy behind the meat counter at Harris Teeter didn't even know what pork belly was (it's the cut from which bacon is usually made, before the curing and slicing) and had to get the butcher - who then told me they didn't stock it. The local international market, though? Score! They had packages and packages of the stuff.


After pork belly, you need a some wonderfully aromatic spices: cinnamon stick and star anise, along with sliced ginger and a few dried red chilis. The bottle with the red label is Shaoxing wine - a standard pantry item if you're doing Chinese cooking, and carried by every Asian market.





First, the pork belly is plunged into boiling water for a few minutes until partially cooked. It looks SO appetizing afterwards. Not.






Out comes the wok. Some sugar and oil go in for a few minutes, until the sugar has melted and caramelized, then all the other ingredients are added - the pork belly, the wine and the aromatics. The whole thing is barely covered with water and the heat is turned down. Set your timer and walk away for 45-50 minutes. Except you can't, because this smells AMAZING. Reminiscent of pho broth, which has pork bones and broth in it, and I suspect some similar spices.



Towards the end of the cooking, turn up the heat to reduce the sauce. The sauce does not get very thick, even after reducing.

I think I reduced the sauce a little too far, just because there wasn't enough of it. The flavor of this dish is wonderful, with the spices and chilis (there is some slight heat), but as most of the flavor is in the sauce and not in the meat itself, you are constantly dunking the pork into the sauce. This is quite fine, we just didn't have enough to dunk in. Next time I think I won't reduce quite as long.

Plain rice is the preferred accompaniment. Fried rice wouldn't really work, I think. Especially since I usually tank up on garlic when I make fried rice, and there is no garlic in this dish. It wouldn't fit the flavor profile, which has a somewhat delicate quality with the star anise and cinnamon.

The pieces of cooked pork belly are delicious - some of the fat you want to eat, and other parts you pick around.

I would definitely make this again.