Char Sui Pork

You make sacrifices to live up here. You mostly live behind 9ft steel fences and razor wire, and not all the tropical frangipanis in the world can hide that fact. It's dangerous to go into town on Thursday, as it's payday and the local troublemakers are out and about.

You ALWAYS lock your car door before leaving the compound.

It's a fact that your house WILL be burgled during your tenure up here. You buy some sort of food when you see them, because you're never sure when you'll see them again.

BUT.. the upside is that everything you buy from the market is organic and local. There are no pesticides up here that are affordable for the locals. And tropical fruits and veg are so unbelievably cheap. I get mud crabs and lobster tails delivered to my door, if I choose. A local, organic pineapple costs about 20c AUD.

And if you shop right, all your meat and eggs are local and organic as well.

Sure, you can buy Zenag or Table Birds chickens, but you can also go to the market and get one slaughtered and plucked for you, right there on the spot.

And not that they slaughter pork on the spot, but depending where you get it from, it's local and effectively free-range.

I say "effectively" because there is really no concept of free-range or organic  up here. It's all just food.

So I get my pork from a farm in the Ramu Valley, where it is left to forage on whatever the jungle can provide.

I can also get cus cus meat and smoked fruit bat, but I am working up to that!

So, to dinner.

While pre-fab sauces, rubs and marinades are becoming more regular in supermarkets, it's just as easy to grab the raw ingredients.

Believe it or not, Char Sui style cooking is popular all over the Pacific Rim,a nd not just indigenous to China. Hawaii has it's own version, as does Malaysia (where you can get vegetarian chari sui, apparently)

Recipe varied from wiki cookbooks version.

Ingredients:

• 1 kg pork shoulder, skin on
• 2 tbsp. dark soy sauce
• 2 tbsp. light soy sauce
• 2 tbsp. oyster sauce
• 2 tbsp. Shaoxing rice wine
• 2 tbsp. clear honey
• 4 tbsp. hoisin sauce
• ½ tsp. five spice
• red food colouring (I omitted this, as it's unavailable up here)

1. Pierce the pork all over thoroughly with a fork. This makes the pork more tender and allows the marinade to penetrate the meat to give flavour all the way through.
2. Mix all other ingredients together.
3. Place pork  in a tray and cover with marinade. Ensure strips are covered completely in marinade.
4. Cover tightly with cling film and place in the refrigerator for several hours. Overnight or for 24 hours is preferable.
5. Preheat the oven to 160°C and  place the pork on a rack over  a pan in the bottom to catch drippings. Line this pan with aluminium foil to make cleaning easier
6. Roast for 20 minutes,  Baste to build up a good layer of marinade on the outside of the meat. The pork should turn a golden-red colour as it cooks. After 20 mins, turn and baste againm giving the pork a further 20 mins at this temp.
7. Increase heat to 220°C for a further 20 mins (total cooking time, 60 mins)
8. If crackle hasn't crisped up, give it a few minute under the grill, to achieve that authentic charred look and flavour.  

1. Heat leftover marinade until it becomes thick and glossy, to use as a dipping sauce.
2. Cut pork into .5cmslices and serve on white rice with sauce/marinade. 

Left over lurve.

Recently I wrote about my version of pulled pork. Having no idea how or what it was, I kinda made it up as I went along. And it was pretty delicious. But then again, what is not to love about pork, slow cooked in vinegar, onions, tomatoes and spices.

But we had a lots.. and AWFUL lot left over.

Tammi suggested that we use the leftovers for pulled pork nachos.

So we did.


HOLY MOTHER OF PORK PRODUCTS, BATMAN!!

It was so gooooood. A few days in the fridge had allowed the pork to achieve a deep sweetness, which went perfectly with the tomatoes and creaminess of the avocado. The textural melange of the pulled pork, the cruch of the corn chips and lettuce and again, the creamy silkiness of the avocado pretty much provided the perfect mouth feel.

Nachos are one of those things that I pretty much avoid unless I am stumped for a vegetarian option for guests. I had truly never thought to use left overs in them, relying (on the odd occasion that I gave in to the pleadings of the Step-Beasts and "made" them) on mince, tomato paste, red kidney beans and something made by El Paso,





Now, they are possibly going to become my staple "turn leftovers into something other than "risotto" dish".

At the risk of bring up the whole "authentic" debate, I am thinking left over chicken Mahkani, garlic corn chips and raita "nachos". Maybe souvlaki lamb, tzatziki and lemon/oregano "nachos".

pulled pork

Australians like to think that they are the BBQ kings and queens of the Universe. And we are. But just as we accuse Americans of being arrogant and insular, so are we about BBQ. The BBQ we know, whether it me dodgy spewpermarket snags over Heat Beads, or gohr-may seafood skewers in a Webber, the truth is BBQ is much MUCH more than that.

Pulled pork is a typical BBQ dish from Southern US, called "pulled" because it is slow cooked to the point that all the connective tissue breaks down and you can pull the pork apart by hand. It is then served in sandwiches and over rice.

In the United States, pulled pork is commonly slow-cooked by a smoking method (known as BBQ'ing), though a non-barbecue method might also be employed.

The preparation of pulled pork differs from region to region. In areas such as Tennessee, pulled pork is typically made from a mixture of the blade shoulder and arm shoulder meat and served with a tomato-based barbecue sauce. In areas such as Noth Carolina, both mixed cuts of the belly and shoulder alone are commonly used, and the pork is served with a vinegar-based sauce or with no sauce.

My pulled pork was slow cooked on the stove top for almost 7 hours. I used a 1kg chunk of pork belly roast and left the skin on.





I slow cooked it with a can of tomatoes, some capers, a fresh sliced jalapeno chilli, some sweet pickled onions (with the vinegar) and plenty of chicken stock. I used my trusty old cast iron camp oven, and had it in low heat for 6.75 hours. I then removed the skin and finely sliced it (the rubbery skin bits made a wonderful textural counterpoint to the meat and the onions) and "pulled" the roast apart with 2 forks. I actually cooked it in 2 sittings, on for 3 hours on Sunday night and then again on Monday. When I got home from work on Monday night, the hours was positively fragrant!

We ate half of it over rice with fresh cracked black pepper, and are saving the other half to use on Thursday, for a nacho topping, a la Tammi Jonas 's suggestion.