Cassoulet

From “Down South” by Donald Link. You will need 6 hours from when this starts cooking to finish. You’ll need about an hour for prep/cutting/putting everything in the pot to cook. Highly recommend home made chicken stock and good beans. If you wanna get fancy, look for a recipe with duck confit but you can really get away with duck fat,

Ingredients:

• 1 lb of Great Northern or Canelli beans
• 2.5 lbs of pork belly cut into 1 1/2″ cubes
• 2 TB kosher salt
• 1 TB black pepper
• 1 lb smoked sausage, 2″ segments
• 4 cups of diced onions
• 2 cups diced celery
• 2 cups diced carrots
• 8 garlic cloves, minced
• 5 bay leaves
• 1 TSP red pepper flakes
• 1 TSP chopped fresh thyme
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1 TB tomato paste
• 3 TB whole grain mustard
• 2 quarts of chicken broth

Directions:

• Soak beans in water overnight
• Season pork cubes with 1TB of salt and 2 TSP of pepper
• Heat oven 250 degrees

• Heat large cast iron pot to med/high
• Sear belly in batches, brown on all sides about 10 mins per batch
• transfer belly to plate with paper towels

• Saute sausage in rendered fat until lightly browned 2-3 min
• add onions, celery, carrots, garlic, bay leaves, red pepper flakes and thyme and 1 TB of salt, 1 tsp pepper
• saute until veggies soften about 5 mins
• pour in wine and simmer, slightly reduce about 3 mins
• add tomato paste and mustard and cook, stirring until the ingredients are evenly combined, 2-3 more mins

• Return pork belly and any accumulated juices to the pot
• add 1 qt of chicken broth and bring to a slow simmer.
• cover and simmer for 60-70 mins – belly should be tender but not falling apart

• add beans and remaining 1 qt of broth, enough to comfortably cover the beans by 2″
• put in oven and bake uncovered stirring the top curst into the beans every hour or so until the beans are tender, about 3 1/2 hrs – add more broth if needed to keep the bean submerged.

• blast the oven to 450 and cook for another 30 mins to form a crust on the top of the bean mixture.
• Push the crust down into the middle of the pot and cook for another 15 mins to form a new crust.
• cool for 30 mins

Char Sui (Easy)

Notes: I didn’t have Lawry’s Garlic Salt so I used 1:1 garlic powder:salt. The end result is a bit too salty when I doubled the batch. It’s ok but needs to be scaled back.

Found the source: Youtube channel “Made With Lau” Char Siu (叉燒) – My dad’s recipe for Chinese BBQ Pork! This channel is nice because some of the recipes I find are simplified here.

Ingredients:

• 1 TB garlic salt (lawry’s)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 2 TB oyster sauce
• 1 TB hosin sauce
• 2 TB light soy sauce
• 1 TB shaoxing wine
• 1 cube fermented bean curd cube with some sauce
• 1 tsp chinese 5 spice

Notes:

• Usually made with pork butt but I’m gonna use this for smoking/bbq rib

Ants In Trees (Chinese Pork Dish)

This is an oldie by Alton Brown. It’s sorta funny how simple and basic this is compared to the other Chinese dishes I have listed. A little heat and soy sauce is pretty much what brings this together. Great for extra ground pork from meatballs left over.

Ingredients

• 4 oz of mung bean noodles (2 bundles, you can use more, I used 3)
• 3 TB oz of soy sauce
• 1 TB of rice wine (I used shaloxing wine)
• 1 TB of sambal chili paste
• 1 tsp of corn starch
• 10 oz of ground pork
• 1 TB of canola oil
• 4 green onions chopped
• 1/2 chicken broth (I skipped this)

Directions:

• Soak noodles in +1″ covering in warm water for 20 mins.
• 3 TB of soy sauce, 1 TB of shaloxing wine, 1 TB of sambal chili paste, 1 tsp of corn starch with the ground pork for 20 mins
• In a pan, high heat (used wok), heat canola oil and throw in pork (if it’s not broke up, take this time to do that, if it is, I browned it on both sides like a big hamburger)
• add 3/4 of green onion, toss
• turn off heat and add noodles to combine. (I added an optional TB of oyster sauce for flavor/color)

Char Siu Roast Pork (Hard)

Making this from scratch from here.

Notes:

Trying to scale this so I’m weighing out ingredients.

I covered this to simmer which saved a bunch of the liquid from evaporating. It still tastes fucking amazing. In the video he cooks it uncovered and there is way less liquid, obviously from simmering for an hour.

Making this the second time, covering the liquid I was able to make 4 batches from the lushui. End product is bangers.

Ingredients

• 2.5 cups of water
• 3 1/3 TB of light soy sauce
• 2 tsp dark soy sauce
• 1/4 cup Shaoxing Rice Wine
• 1/2 cup (40g) of white part of green onion minced (1 bunch is short for this recipe)
• 1/4 (24g) cup ginger minced
• 8-10 (10g) star anise
• 2 sticks cinnamon (7g)
• ½ tsp galangal powder
• 12 (too light to weigh) whole cloves
• 2 black cardamon
• 5g liquorice root
• 1 (5g) dried tangerine peel
• 1/2 dried Luo Han Guo

2nd Part

• 3 TB Red Miso 面豉
• 3 TB maltose or honey 麦芽糖 x3 3/4 cup
• 1 TB liquid fermented red bean paste (tofu) 南乳
• 50g rock sugar (rock sugar candy)冰糖 x3 200g
• 1/4 tsp of red yeast rice or Hungarian sweet paprika

Directions

Fry aromatics. Your minced white-part-of-green-onion and ginger and the smallest oil that you could muster, about 1 minute or so on medium heat.

Add in the (rice wine), then the water and the two soy sauces, then the spices. a except the shajiang (galangal powder)

Simmer on low for 30-90 minutes. What we’re doing here is basically making what’s called a lushui (卤水), which is a braising base of soy sauce and spices that is used in a ton of Chinese dishes.

Strain out the spices and aromatics. The reason we made this lushui first before adding the thicker ingredients is that if you just added in sugars and thicker sauces together with the spices, the sauce is gunna stick to your spices.

Add in ¾ cup of the reserved lushui liquid, the red miso, the liquid of the red fermented tofu, the shajiang (cutcherry powder), the ground red yeast rice (or sweet paprika), and the chunk of rock sugar. Then simmer. We’re going to be simmering this on low until the rock sugar dissolves. Spoon the sauce over the rock sugar to help it along, and add in a couple tablespoons of your reserved lushui liquid in case it’s reducing a little too much (for the batch that I did in the video, I had to do this once). Take a look at the video at 5:08 for a visual of how thick we’re aiming this to be.

Turn off the heat, add in the Maltose.

Marinate:

3:1 Char sui sauce : soy sauce. Preferably 24 hours for marinating.

You can baste with 1:1 sauce and honey during the cooking.