My diverted palate stretching from the healthy Japanese cuisine to the fiery and spicy Indian curry, and occasionally sampled the traditional Nyonya kuih and pungent tofu from Taiwan.ĭespite the varieties of food, Char Siu remains the most regular food on my food list, simply because there is a nostalgic emotion involved, that it is the first Chinese street food that I ever tasted. I began to appreciate different types of food as we lived in a multiracial campus with friends from all races.
My college years and beyondįast forward to my colleague years away from home in Penang. What I can remember was the taste was heavenly, and eating the plain rice with a massive amount of sauce as the topping. The meat was succulent and tender the gravy was a combination of soy sauce, oyster sauce, and some other ingredients I did not know when I was young. It did not sound like a huge reward, but it finally unfolded the mysterious flavor Char Siu that has been bothering me for a very long time. The day I had my first bite of Char Siu eventually arrived when my teacher took us for lunch after we won an inter-school table tennis competition.
Red bean paste char siu how to#
If you have white wine or sherry, those will work too.Char Siu was not on the menu since my mother did not know how to make it. I also didn’t have any rice wine so I used brandy instead. The combination of all of these ingredients worked really well to replace the Hoisin Sauce to the point where I didn’t even notice it was missing. To make up for the lack of Hoisin I added miso paste (also made of fermented soybeans and also replacing the red bean curd which I didn’t have), extra soy sauce (made of fermented soybeans too), extra honey, and extra Chinese 5 Spice. If you are unfamiliar with Hoisin Sauce it is a sweet fermented soybean sauce with a base of flavours similar to Chinese 5 Spice. I have yet to find a good quality gluten-free version of this so I left it out of the recipe. One of the main ingredients in Char Siu is typically Hoisin sauce. Making the marinade is as easy as putting ingredients in a bowl and stirring them. The secret to the incredible flavour of Char Siu is in the marinade which doubles as a basting liquid and even plays a thrid roll as a sauce later (once it has been boiled). The recipe I created is based on one I found online which seemed pretty good. To accommodate my issues with gluten and to use ingredients I already had on hand I changed the basic recipe a little bit, but we will get into that later. The main flavours of Char Siu are typically Chinese 5 spice, honey, soy sauce, rice wine, hoisin sauce, and red bean curd. It’s always best not to die your food with red food colouring if you can avoid it. As nice as the red colour is, if you can’t find red bean curd or Korean Chili powder, I recommend just leaving it. It’s also possible that the red bean curd was added to mimic that natural red line. It is likely that char siu was originally cooked slowly over an open fire leading to a red smoke ring around the meat. The colour of mine comes from Korean Chili Powder. The red colour of char siu generally comes from either red bean curd or red food colouring. And if you are looking for something different to do with a big chunk of pork, something that will keep you up at night with cravings, then this is it. The recipe I’m going to share with you today isn’t the recipe from all those years ago in the mall Chinese Food place, and I’d be hard-pressed to call it authentic. A sweet, and incredibly flavourful pork dish that to this day is one of my strongest memories from that period of my life. It wouldn’t be until years later that I’d realize what I was serving that day and subsequently had for lunch every Thursday that summer was Char Siu, aka Chinese BBQ Pork. I asked what it was and the manager told me, “Chinese BBQ Pork”.
There, in the tray where the daily special always went, was a pile of bright red pieces of pork.
When I arrived at work the steam table was already set up and as my eyes scanned the all familiar pre-lunch mounds of fried rice, lo mein, sweet and sour pork, and beef and broccoli, something caught my eye. It was my first Thursday working and so it was also the first time I was seeing the Thursday special. Every day of the week there was a different special at the restaurant. It was the year 2000, I was 15 years old and working for the summer in a mall Chinese Food place in Southern Ontario.
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