Dongpo Pork Recipe
Dongpo Pork Recipe
I haven’t cooked this dish, called Dongpo, pork for a really long time. Dongpo pork is one of the first dishes I ever cooked for Chris and to this day it’s one of his favourites. I remember just after we married I cooked this dish a lot and really spoiled him.
But sadly we ate this dish too many times (literally every few days for a few weeks) and we got a bit tired of it, so it’s really nice for both of us to come back to it and eat it again. Every bite of this meat is so amazingly tasty and if cooked right the pork will literally melt in your mouth.
Dongpo is the name of a great and famous writer in Chinese history. Su Dongpo was a great writer, poet, artist, calligrapher, pharmacologist and statesman of the Song Dynasty. He loved not just writing but also food.
There are many different versions of stories for this pork dish but I will only introduce the version of the story I like in my blog today. This pork dish was created when Su Dongpo worked and lived in Huang Zhou. One day he decide to make stewed pork and one of his old friend suddenly visited him during cooking. He challenged Su Dongpo to a game of Chinese chess and Su Dongpo had totally forgotten he had a pork stew on the stove. He found out he had this stewed pork cooking on his stove until the end of the game and the amazing fragrant smell from his kitchen reminded him of it. He tasted the pork with his friends and shockingly found out how wonderful taste of this dish is. This is how Dongpo’s pork been created. It’s a wonderful accident.
Here is my recipe for this Dongpo’s Pork and I hope you will enjoy this dish with your family and friends.
Credit: These photos were taken by Chris at Chris Radley Photography
Dongpo Pork
Ingredients
Ingredients
- 500 g pork belly cut into 5cm squares
- 2 thin slices ginger
- 2 spring onions cut into 3cm lengthways
- 4 cloves garlic remove the skin
- 1 star anise
- 5 cm cinnamon stick
- 1 slice dried liquorice
- 1 slice dried tangerine skin
Seasonings
- 3 tbsp crystal sugar available in Chinese supermarkets but you can use brown sugar
- 2 cups Shaoxing rice wine
- 1 cup light soy sauce
- 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
Instructions
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Use the string to tie the pork up like a parcel and blanch the pork in the boiling water with another couple thin slices of ginger. After just rinsing under cold water and leave it on aside.
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Heat a tablespoon of oil in the wok and sauté the spring onion, ginger, garlic first and add all the spice into the wok and keep sauté it until the fragrant smell comes out.
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Place the step 2 into a small stock pot and re-heat the wok from step 2 again with a little bit of oil.
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Add crystal sugar into the wok and stir it until the crystal sugar caramelized and add soy sauce and a bit of water to boil it.
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Place pork into the stock pot from step 2 and make sure the pork is on top of the spring onion, ginger and garlic.
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Add the sauce from step 4 into that stock pot and make sure the sauce have to cover over the pork and add Shaoxing rice wine.
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Cook the pork in strongest gas power and after it boiling turn the gas power to the lowest and simmer it for a couple hours and it’s ready to serve.
