How to Make Home-style Red Braised Pork Belly (红烧肉)
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- Опубликовано: 28 май 2017
- This time our guest cook Rob whipped up some Hongshaorou, a.k.a. Red braised pork belly! An awesome dish, real simple... and with no real exotic ingredients, so it's pretty easy to make if you're outside of China too.
If you're a bit hesitant because of the pork skin and fat, don't be - after cooking low and slow, the pork skin'll turn into jelly and the fat'll melt in your mouth like butter.
As always, a detailed recipe and ingredient list is in this /r/cooking post on reddit:
/ recipe_how_to_make_chi...
ABOUT US
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I'm Chris Thomas from the United States and I've been living as an expat in China now for upwards of nine years, most of which in Shenzhen. I love living here, and the food is absolutely incredible. I read and speak some Chinese, and have been trying to religiously recreate the most authentic versions of the food I've eaten and loved here.
My partner in these videos is Stephanie Li, my similarly food-and-travel-obsessed long term girlfriend. She's a translator from Guangzhou and is an incredible home cook. Sometimes I'll be behind the wok but usually it'll be her cooking. 
Хобби
![Red Braised [Anything], Home-style](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EA2Mx1m7NAI/mqdefault.jpg)
![Red Braised [Anything], Home-style](/img/tr.png)
I've made this twice now. Solid, straight forward recipe and an excelent description of the method.
This is, hands down, my favourite dish.
Sugar and meat is almost a forbidden combination but always good. Rillons, pork marabella...
if i keep eating, i'll have my own pork belly lol
Bitten_By_Frost no problem
you can have mine! but it might be tough!
If you manage the amount of food you ingest, your body will be much more forgiving about the content. As long as you're hitting all the bases and managing side effects, of course.
you made a joke lol and wrote lol so we know you are so funny lol lol
In fact, it’s known that pigs have the same flavour as humans. Google “long pig”.
I absolutely love this dish, my grandmother would cook it for me every time I achieve something in school when I was young as a reward. Since we're shanghainese, our version is usually sweater with this super sticky glaze onto the pork belly at the end, but your version looks absolutely amazing and I'd gobble up every morsel with a bowl of rice!
Shanghai style is best style.
Totally not personally biased :p
Everyone has different way of cooking 红烧肉, my family usually cover the raw pork with cold water completely, add ginger and cooking wine, boil to remove the stink smell of the pork, the water will not be used for cooking it later as ...it has the raw pork stink. Clay pot is ideal, northern china typically chao tang se, but southern china do not as this process make pork surface harder in the end, they just dump the suger in soup, not too much water is needed as the stock will be reduced until completely gone, the stock would be covered on the pork and no source is needed . Although ways of cooking this dish is quite different , the ending result of your receipt looks delicious too
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Emmie Muljadi 77248
I would not use the water it have been blanched in either, as a professional chef, I always throw that away.
Regarding the water used for blanching: what you say is exactly what my mom would do too - discard it.
Not sure, but I once heard that the bad pork smell is when the meat is from a Male Pig. In Belgium (and I think most of western Europe) they castrate the Male Pig before reaching sexual maturity to prevent this smell. It is what I heard, but I am not confident enough to say it is true.
Your videos are awesome! I cook Chinese food often, but I still learn new techniques/knowledge from your videos. So many cooking videos just shows the "how", but I love that you explains the "why" as well.
I invested in a traditional Asian clay pot years ago that finally broke after a decade and took my heart along with it😩. In recent weeks I've been experimenting with a traditional (stove top safe) western crock pot as a substitute method for recreating dishes like this, and I'm happy to report that it's working beautifully! You can just start your dish in the morning and leave it to slowly steam braise with fantastic results. I find that that a bit of braising liquid can also be used to cook noodles...its alll so insanely delicious!
A pressure cooker made my life a lot simplier, blanch the pork, add ingredients to cooker, high pressure for 1hr and then broil to reduce sauce, the pork is so tender it melts in your mouth
1:00 “It’s watery... with a smack of ham!”
"I call it Hot Ham Water!"
A good trick with steaming/reducing in unsuitable pots its to put a cloth between the lid and the pot, works a charm. Though this is from Russian plov, so YMMV.
I made this recipe yesterday and it was amazing. Love the channel!
GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT!!!! I am already planning a dinner party based upon two or three of your recipes (including this one). Thanks for taking the time to make this and for sharing it! RUclips ROCKS!
Awesome, how'd it go?
Chinese Cooking Demystified I had to postpone due to travel, but I really appreciate you taking the time to ask. I was thinking about other recipes that I would like the, and I realized that I would like to know how to do more with eggplant, as well as things to do with Szechuan peppercorns. If, of course, this fits with your plans. Thanks!
I would reduce the sauce to a thick paste and drizzle that over rice.
I tried that before, it was way too salty.
@@youknowmyname9915 You can try using a low sodium soy sauce, but if the sauce is tasting salty even up against all that sugar, you may be adding too much soy sauce to begin with. The reduced sauce should still be sweet.
Yu ou cant drizzle paste. Also, that's too much reduction
Just thicken it with starch if you want it saucy...
@@MintyFarts eeewww no. This has to be thickened only by reducing the braising liquid
Finally! I can make this! Thanks guys you are amazing.
The owners at the Chinese restaurant i work at make this every year for Christmas and it is absolutely one of my favorite dishes of all time, they usually go for thinner slices of pork belly as it stretches it out enough for everyone in the kitchen and front of house to eat, however they add whole boiled eggs and they are absolute heaven
Will definitely try this out with the egg variation!
Humm!! Yummy I'm hungry now, Thanks for sharing.
I can't tell what looks more appetizing, that pork belly or Rob.
Yes
WOW I love your channel, thanks for sharing these recipes with such an easy to follow instructions!
Followed this recipe for a Chinese themed cooking night with some friends. Came out great! Will definitely be making this for myself in the future.
I’ve been making this semi regularly in a 2 piece lodge cast iron using to top to fry the aromatics. Works great.
I've just had lunch and I STILL got hungry watching this.
Oh Man! That looks SO good!
Will definitely be making it!
This is the “unofficial” national dish of China, literally every household probably knows how to make it
The end result reminds me of the pigs feet and pork hock my dad used to cook! same colour but very gelatinous, a humble but very tasty served with some cut bean curd stick with rice and steamed salt fish that I actually hated as a kid lol good to see some authentic food guys
That looks sooooo good!
Fantastic it looks awesome I will try this tonight thank you so much
Looks great! I just tried it today.
that looks amazing well done. glad I found you on reddit. Subscribing!
Oh am I sooo ready for the coming cold months here in DC! Thank you for all your videos...
I just made some of this a few days ago, I like my home cooked better, and mine looks just like yours. Probably tastes similar too. We just harvested our home grown lotus roots to cook with, now thats some good eating right there....!
Thanks for sharing your recipe it's nearly identical to mine, any pork belly dish is exciting to me, I love it.
Daaaaaamn, like my mothers recipe!
You did it great!!
I am cooking this tomorrow. Thank you!
What i learned over the years with pork belly,pretty much no mater how and what you do to it,its just amazing!
OMG, I made this today and used your recipe as.guide......delicious ❤❤❤
Again, great job with getting the authentic technique down! My Amah would approve! We don't par boil our meat though as the pork won't take on the caramelized sugar as well compared to when raw... the intense heat from the almost smoking sugar is supposed to sieze the outside of the meat so that when you braise it for a long time it doesn't fall apart and yet will still melt in your mouth. That is what I was told.
Right, so this is our friend's recipe. I don't par boil mine and just fry it with sugar due to pure laziness, lol. But I think his version is very good too. And easier to control for someone who's not familiar with frying up sugar till it caramelizes. :)
Wasze przepisy są super smakują całej mojej rodzinie
This looks soooooo good. Thanks for posting this video!
Cheers, thx for liking :)
I've tried combining hongshaorou with a Romanian recipe for stewed cabbage (varză călită), a dish that's often served or even cooked together with pork. Instead of adding paprika and tomatoes to the cabbage, I added the extra sauce from the pork. I still need to adjust the recipe a bit (namely the sauce to cabbage ratio), but it's a great combo.
I also tried using this braising liquid for other leaner cuts of pork. Naturally, they weren't nearly as good as the pork belly (few cuts of meat are), but it still works well if you're trying to keep it "diet".
I used to get it at this place in Charlottesville. The put potatoes in ...omg. Ive made this a few times, and i think I'll be making this again very soon
My mom is half chinese half dutch and she cant make this recipe.. she asked me to find some youtube vidio about how to make one, i found this vidio and thought the whole time the guy describing it is a chinese guy.. i was surprised at the end of vidio that he is caucasian.. big respect for him to know this kinda highly skilled dishes from other culture 🙏🏻 seriously this channel has blown away my mind 😱😱😱
This is a really good recipe, thanks!
You have a lovely kitchen! All of the plants look so healthy and pleasant, I would like to have a similar kitchen someday. Food looks great, can't wait to try it.
Haha our kitchen is small and dark and would be a sad looking place to shoot a cooking video lol. We figured things'd look much better out on our balcony (which we usually just use for grilling)... if you're curious, at about two minutes in the Pearl Meatball vid we go inside to the kitchen to mince up the meat.
And yeah, Steph's the green thumb and she's done an awesome job with that balcony space.
The key ingredients to Dong Po Rou is Chinese cooking wine (shaoxing if you have), soy sauce, sugar (red sugar the closest it you cant find rock sugar), green onions and sliced ginger for the bedding for the pork blocks. The spices are optional and the use of water (to fill everything before boiling-braising) can be done if you don't have enough cooking wine.
Some Chinese go way beyond and steam the braised pork blocks along with its liquid (minus the solid ingredients) for an hour or more to further soften it (it will thicken the braising liquid for strange reasons). I see it as atas excessive and you can do it if you have more time to spare, but doing it on a pot or pressure cooking is more than enough
I’ll cook this this weekend thank you
Ty. I’ll cook this next time
THE CHEF OR COOK IS VERY HANDSOME..MMMMM
my family usually uses relatively lean meant, but we stew it for hours so that it's still fall-apart tender.
Great channel, lots of useful information, thank you.
WoW! You really cook well!
humba.. lami nga sud-an..
I've been doing these braise recipes on one of those budget haier hot plates the last few days. The lowest heat I can get is 60C but it pulses on and off. Furthermore I'm using a conventional metal pot an glass lid. The results have been.... interesting haha
This is similar to what my mom used to cook, I'll try this one out.
Blown away by this channel. Thank you both so much for your work! Bringing real Chinese food to the 外国人 😂 can you please do jiangnan style 干锅花菜？ I love that dish
I add hardboiled eggs to the braise. They taste amazing after absorbing all the sauce
this is a great recipe, made it tonight with great success!
Awesome, great to hear. Got any pictures?
Yummy, thanks so much
Nice video with alot of good information. Didnt know the cool water would shrink the pork!
Your voice is soothing.
0:45 looking like you are testing the boiling water with a finger for a split second
Tks
Now I know what I'm going to have for dinner...😋😋😋😋😋
I need to try making this one!
A couple years ago, after my first trip to China, i kept talking about the braised pork belly ("Pig Fat" as my Chinese corowker called it) and how awesome it was. Well my Mom decided to look up a recipe and try to make it. I felt bad, she messed up somewhere and it came out like a Chinese spiced pulled pork. It was literally a pile of disintegrated pig stuff. It tasted ok, but nothing like what you get in China. I ate it. it was OK. But i need to try this recipe.
Thanks for a great recipe. Just wondering if i could substitute palm sugar for the rock sugar?
Can you show us how to make Baijiu? or any of the other home ferment fruit wines so common to nainai’s kitchen?
Love your channel!!!
thanks for the recipe very nice, one comment regarding the hot water normally in Chinese cooking we discard the boiled water as we consider the meat being dirty from being handled in the market obviously is cleaner now but old habits die hard, i see my mom throwing it away and i just keep doing it.
I tried doing this today and came out fantastic. What happened with mine though is after 90 minutes nearly all liquid evaporated and ended up with a sticky delicious glaze that coated the pork. It went down very well with steamed rice and a beer!
Oh, and it came out a bit on the spicy side because the only chillis I have in the house are bird's eye. But I'm super okay with that, I love spicy food. Thanks for the recipe!
That’s Chinese food for you. Just use whatever you have and make it however you like it!
going to make my own variation of this tonight
I love pork
Just made it. Very yummy. I didn't have some ingredients. Instead of liaojiu I used white wine, instead of dark soy sauce I added a little bit of oyster sauce and didn't have sichuan chili so used cayenne chili because it was the only I had. It turned out delicious nevertheless. Next time I will get the right ingredients and try to do it again.
"i'll just skip blanching, it's fine"
*throws cold chicken on the caramel which instantly hardens and sticks to the pan in chunks, but not the meat*
Good point about adding cold meat to caramelised sugar.
The only person who preserved that liquid fpr later use. What a smart move. Its actually good not to throw away the water because all the pure taste of pork is in that liquid and people just thtow it away.
Quick thank you, I made this last week and it came out amazing. Other channels only say to cook for like 30 minutes or so often using pressure cooker or even rice cookers instead of pots. I wanted something more traditional for my first attempt (plus I only have 1 rice cooker and i wanted rice). I had to adjust a few things (I don't have access some of the ingredients so I used Chinese 5 spice powder and mirin instead of the wine you are using and regular soy sauce rather than dark.) it came out great and my boyfriend is asking for more already, lol.
A similar wine to use instead of the Shaoxing wine is sherry.
@@SuperDachande I'll try that next time, thank you!
Aubrey Morgan You’re most welcome 👍
Making this right now, it smells pretty damn good so far. Hoping it's as good as it looks!
Making it again. It's 1000 times better than it looks
On my second rewatching, I'm just noticing you have this dreamy quality about your voice when talking about the pork belly haha
Those crazy chinese mukbangers brought me here because it looked so delicious when they ate .🤣🤣
Rob looks like a cool guy, come over for a shot rob!
If you are worried about keeping the meat structure, you can use twine to tie up each piece of pork in both directions (like a present) before cooking. That's what my dad does.
if you boil it enough it should hold together really well
Yum!
Yum ❤
Your videos always remind me why I only eat out for Chinese food.
Why?
@@redryderaus Because I either don't have the ingredients, or I don't have the time. Or if the stars do align and I got money and time, I am bound to F up something and ruin hours of work.
I'll just go to the reliable old local Chinese Restaurant that's been there since before I was born and have them make it for me. :'(
great video! do you take requests?
please keep it up, because your instructions are good, and great production value too !
Yep! If we know it, we'll do it, though it might be a few vids later :)
And... I dunno about our production value lol
whati meant was high quality but still homey atmosphere... it doesn't look like you're in a studio.
3:33 shiaoxing wine 😴🙌🏻
This is so ASMR lol
Hi, I'm really enjoy watching your videos...actually I think I'm addicted! I have a recipe request please. I eat at a Yunnan Restaurant called 'Silk Road'. They have a dish called 'Spicy Fish in Chili Oil" which is amazing. It also has Chinese vegetables with it. Do you know of it? If so, can you do a video for it please?
YES FINALLY
People think this is daunting but, it is manageable at home; its main flavor component is shaoxing wine, ginger, soysauce and rock/brown sugar you can ditch the rest of the spice aromatics if you can get a hold of it
i've been super lazy lately admittedly.
I just put everything into a pressure cooker and let it do it's thing cuz it's faster and more convenient.
I should probably try this again the old fashioned way
I appreciate your recipe and thanks for sharing, and how about the recipe of pork belly with a dried vegetable preserved?
Meicai kourou, right? Totally on the list :)
Oh is he the cook? Soo handsome!
Mum?
I love Gahori 🐽😍. Never knew Chinese people eat sugar so much in meat.
I just made this and it's honestly the best thing I've eaten in such a long time. So good! I wish my local chinese restaurants cooked anything like this but the UK chinese food is disgusting.
Also I just used a Dutch Oven and tilted the lid a bit. Also I removed the pork at the end and reduced the liquid a bit further than you and it became this chinese barbecue treacle it blew my fucking mind.
Thank you so much for this video I'm going to try out so many of your recipes now if they are anywhere near as good as this one.
Look in immigrant neighborhoods in larger cities, you might have better luck.
聪明人食谱
0:57 I see youuu (reflection in the water)
ALSO, this looks amazing!
Looks great! BTW...what did you do with the extra sauce, is there a dish where this can be used?
Put some hardboiled eggs in, let them soak overnight :)
oil in hot pan, add some chili/garlic whatever or nothing. Then add chopped napa cabbage, with the extra sauce from HongShaoRou. Wait the cabbage to be soft and colored. Add just a hint of vinegar before serving. Done
Great looking dish. Would this work in a slow cooker done over a longer period?
OK I can now answer my own question. The texture and taste are great, but it's much darker and looks less appetising than yours :-)
Thanks for another great classic recipe. Could you tell us the difference between dongpo rou and Hongshao Rou? From what I've seen, the Hongshao Rou uses spices, which dongpo does not. Also, does dongpo use a longer braise time? Or is the difference only in presentation? The dongpo certainly appears to appease the aesthetic sensibilities of some great poet, whereas the Hongshao is looks like a simple home cooked meal.
It's tough to speak in broad generalities, as there's a million different versions of Hongshaorou and almost as many varieties of Dongporou. It's true that they do share a lot of similarities.
The biggest difference is the tangse, or caramel. With Hongshaorou it's critical, and you'll always stir-fry the pork in the tangse first. Certain varieties of Hongshaorou ('Mao-style) only use the smallest bit of soy sauce, and get most of their color just from that caramel.
Now to confuse things, sometimes some Dongporou'll also have some tangse in it... but the meat's never fried in it. Dongporou is blanched then stewed directly, with one of the most critical ingredients being the liaojiu rice wine. And as you say, presentation's also different - we did basically the upper limit of how big of a chunk of Hongshaorou could be (often it's smaller pieces), and Dongporou's always a big chunk of pork belly and often held together with twine. IIRC Dongporou's usually cooked about twice as long as Hongshaorou too.
But yeah, the difference is subtle, kinda like the difference between an old fashioned English beef stew and a boeuf bourguignon.
dam that recipe is so simple!
Umami..😘😘
Don't have a clay pot with a hole in the lid? Use a normal pot, place the lid askew so there's a small gap for steam to escape. Ta da, sauce reduction with no extra cookware required.
Maos favorite food ❤
I don’t think my mom would use the first water because typically that water is considered used to take out the odd scent of raw pork and other “impurities”. That first water would be discarded.
4:19 I like those orange toenails lol