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.

General Tso's Chicken

General Tso's Chicken is one of the most beloved dishes in Chinese-American cuisine. Known as a Hunanese dish, its actual roots to Hunan province are pretty tenuous. Fuchsia Dunlop has a fascinating write-up on the history of the dish in her Hunan cookbook, and excerpts of the story were printed in the New York Times.

Chef Peng - a Hunan-born chef who invented the dish while cooking for the exiled Nationalist party in Taiwan (read the NYT excerpt) - altered his creation for the very different taste buds he encountered when he moved to America. The Taiwanese version of the dish does not have any sugar; the adapted version for Americans does - not much, just a few teaspoons, but that's enough to give the sauce the characteristic sweetness for which it is so famous. Fuchsia has a recipe for each version in her cookbook and this week I tried both on back to back evenings. (Note: the recipe linked in the post title is for the Taiwanese version, not the Americanized version.)

The first step, obviously, is deep frying. I didn't think this out very well on the first night and did the frying in the wok. Which works in theory, only the wide opening and low sides meant splatters went everywhere - I have a splatter guard but it doesn't fit over all of the wok. On the second night, I wised up and did the frying portion in a different pot with high sides, and then did the sauce and final mixing in the wok.

General note about frying - if you do this with any kind of regularity, do yourself a favor and buy two things from your local cooking supply store. One is an oil thermometer. This is a different device from a probe thermometer (also useful, but for different applications) and it removes all guesswork about oil temperature. In frying the chicken pieces, I could watch the oil temperature fluctuate with each new addition of room-temp chicken to the hot oil, and could allow the oil to get back to the right range before adding the next batch, etc. No wonder my first attempts at frying were such a disaster - oil temperature is key. The other insanely useful device is the thing I'm holding chicken pieces with in this picture. Williams Sonoma calls theirs a "spider skimmer" and it's essentially a wire basket on the end of a stick. It is the best tool for scooping things out of hot oil. The thin wire lets most of the oil escape, so you don't end up with little pools hiding in your ladle that then drip all over the paper towels you laid out to keep your freshly fried food crisp. With these two tools, any pot with high sides and a splatter guard, I've been able to fry with confidence. Well, more confidence than I initially had, anyway.

The technique for both recipes is pretty much identical. The only differences are minor ones, in the ingredients lists. One has sugar, one doesn't - one has twice as much potato flour as the other - small variances like that. The sauce ingredients are slightly different - the Americanized version calls for Chinkiang (black) vinegar, the Taiwanese for clear rice vinegar.

At the end of the day, we liked the Americanized version better, hands down. The Taiwanese version was good - it had a heat and slight sourness that was delicious, but "General Tso's", to us as Americans, means a sweet-hot sauce. That's just what we're used to and what we associate with this dish. I should point out though - whereas the General Tso's you get from takeout restaurants here in the US has a syrupy-sweet sauce, this is definitely not that. This is not syrupy.

When I made another of Fuchsia's recipes - for Gong Bao Chicken - I realized through trial and error that increasing the sauce in proportion to the other ingreidents threw off the whole balance of flavors. General Tso's, though, is much less of a balancing act, flavor-wise. Sichuan cuisine is all about seasoning complexity, whereas Hunanese flavors are much more straightforward. So I might try doing more of the sauce in future, and see how that goes. There wasn't enough to moisten the rice, and we really liked that sweet-spicy sauce!

Additional side perk of home wok experimentation: any night I don't know what to do for dinner, Matt now suggests trying a new Chinese dish.