Red Braised Pork Belly 红烧肉 (Hong Shao Rou) Recipe

Hello folks, Happy Winter Solstice to everyone! Tonight is supposed to be the shortest day of the year (so obviously night time is going to be longer). For the Chinese, today we celebrate 冬至 which literally means winter solstice festival in English. We will prepare glutinous rice ball (tong yuen) in the morning and offer some for prayers before eating them ourselves later in the day. They used to say every year you eat tong yuen and that signifies that you're getting one year older. Every year, Winter Solstice is an important day as my extended family will all gather together and have a great feast for dinner! With a great feast, comes a long day of slaving away in the kitchen preparing dish after dish of food for the dinner. Today I am going to share the recipe of a dish which I just made for the first time ever: 红烧肉! The source of inspiration for this dish is due to all the mainland chinese dramas that I've been watching previously where they keep bringing up this dish! Hehe...

Ingredients:

600g of pork belly

40g of rock sugar (crushed - about one small rice bowl)

4 cloves of garlic

10 g of ginger (approx. 1 inch block)

10 g of the white parts of green onions

2 tbsp of soy sauce

1 tbsp of cooking wine

1 1/2 tsp of salt

4-5 tbsp of cooking oil

Water

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STEP 1: PREPARE THE INGREDIENTS

1. Cut the pork belly into 0.5 inch thick pieces.

2. Mince the garlic.

3. Slice up the ginger.

4. Chop up the white parts of the green onions.

5. Crush the rock sugar further with a mortar and pestle.

STEP 2: BOIL THE PORK FOR 2-3 MINUTES

Heat up a pot of water.

Add the pork belly inside and let it boil for 2-3 minutes.
You will notice a lot of residue coming out, so discard all the residue.
Drain the pork belly and remove excess water by squeezing them a little.

STEP 3: CARAMELIZED THE SUGAR!

Add cooking oil into a heated wok. 

After awhile, add the crushed rock sugar into the wok and turn to medium heat.
Take care to keep stirring otherwise it will burn super fast!

Once all the rock sugar has melted, look out for the color change. We want to
achieve this brown caramel color. Once you see this color, turn to low heat to
prevent your sugar from burning. I totally burnt my sugar on the first try and it
was terrible! Haha! Now, we got to work quick from here on.

STEP 4: ADD THE PORK BELLY AND BRAISE!

Quickly add the pork belly into the melted sugar and toss until evenly coated.
Add the ginger, garlic, green onions, soy sauce and cooking wine. Mix evenly.

Add enough water until it reaches slightly below the pork surface.
Make sure it doesn't totally cover the pork belly!
Bring the water to boil and then turn to low heat.
Cover and simmer for 1 hour on low heat.

STEP 5: TIME TO REDUCE THE SAUCE AND IT'S DONE!

After 1 hour, this is how my pork belly is doing. The sauce is darker, smells great! 

Add 1.5 tsp of salt and mix evenly. Then, turn on high heat and let it boil crazily
until most of the water content evaporates. This thickens the sauce!

Once you see the sauce reduce until about this much left, you can turn off the
heat and serve! The fatty pork belly is glistening now! Haha! Yums!

Hope you all like this simple recipe for red braised pork belly! I've got to specially thank my mom for cutting up all the ingredients for me as I wasn't feeling well yesterday. That saved a lot of work for me. Though I am quite sorry for burning her claypot during my first try of caramelizing the sugar, hehehe. Oh wells, it is all life lessons :P

Happy cookin' and happy winter solstice  ☺