Tiger bite Pig Recipe

For some reason, Taiwanese people really like name their food in a different and funky way.  For example, “Coffin Bread” and also  “Tiger bite Pig”, which is also known as “Koah-pau” in Taiwanese.

Why is it called tiger bite pig? Because the bread looks like a tiger chewing a piece of big and juicy pork in it’s mouth, that’s why we call it Tiger bite Pig. Another dish named after the look.

Nowadays, Taiwanese business man created different filling and flavour for this dish. For example, they use deep fried chicken fillet, cod fish fillet or beef to replace the stewed pork belly. So, this dish is just like a “Taiwanese version of hamburger”.

This dish has another lucky meaning of it. Because the shape looks like a “wallet” so it’s also mean “rich” or “a lot of money” in Taiwan. So, let’s make it at home and eat a lot of tiger bite pig for praying for a lucky financial year! (I need eat a lot of tiger bite pig this year and need probably three times a day, lol).

Ingredients for stewed pork:

450g pork belly with skin
2 spring onions
2 thin slices of ginger

Seasonings for stewed pork:

1 tablespoon maltose
1 tablespoon brown suger
(You can also use 80g crystal sugar, I just use the ingredients I got at home and I think crystal sugar is available in most of Chinese supermarket)
400g soy sauce
100g rice wine
1 star anise
2 slices of liquorice (optional)
5 cm long cinnamon for 1
(You can use a Chinese spice bag to replace all the spice in this dish if you can find it in Chinese supermarket.)
Stock for covering the pork.

Procedures for stewed pork:

1.   Use a frying pan to heat up 1 tablespoon oil and turn the gas power to lowest and fry the pork belly. Don’t use too much oil or too high heat because I don’t want you to burn yourself.
2.   Fry the pork until it’s turn slightly golden colour and place it on a plate then brush a little bit of soy sauce on every side of it to colour it with soy sauce. Leave it until it’s cool down and we cut it into 1.5 cm thick and 5 cm wide slice.

3.   Place every thing into a small stock pot and use full gas power to boil it first, then turn the gas power to the lowest to simmer it until the pork is nice and soft.

Ingredients for steamed bread:

200 g plain flour
250 g bread flour
1 cup of water
7g dried yeast

Procedures for steamed bread:

1.   Mix yeast with the water and melt the yeast.
2.   Mix step 1 with flour and knead it until it’s turn to a smooth dough.

3.   Find a warm spot for the dough and cover it by a cling film or clean and wet tea towel then leave it for 30~40 minutes. I live in Edinburgh and the weather here is really cold so I leave it for 30~40 minutes.

4.   After the dough arise. We separate it into 70g each and knead it into round shape then we use a rolling pin to flatten it into a long oval-shaped.  After we brush oil on the flatten dough and fold it to half and use rolling pin gently press down the central to make the shape settle

5.   Steam it in a steamer with medium to full gas power for 8~10 minutes until you touch the bread and it’s has resilience, not too soft like the dough before. Then it’s done!

* After you done steamed bread and stewed pork then you can start add make your tiger bite pig. Traditionally, we put peanut powder and coriander with stewed pork. But you also can put anything you like it.

Credit: These photos were taken by Chris at: http://www.chrisradleyphotography.com