Issue 009: Char Siu Pork
A recipe for the famous Chinese roast meat
Over the past week my Instagram feed has been awash with tributes to Hung’s restaurant, a stalwart of London’s Chinatown, which sadly closed permanently after 20 years in business. The downturn caused by the global pandemic proving too much of a financial burden to overturn. Many have commented that this is more than just a casualty of the pandemic, but part of a greater narrative of the gradual erosion of Chinatown’s first generation of Cantonese immigrant-run businesses – see also the entire lower west side of Charing Cross Road, the gradual encroachment of Leicester Square on the southern end of Wardour Street, and the ‘smartening up’ of Newport Place, where many of the Chinese supermarkets and street stalls I frequented whilst studying at Central Saint Martins are no more.
Sadly, I never made it to Hung’s, but have frequented its neighbours Café TPT and Wong Kei numerous times since moving to London 12 years ago. Hung’s was a late night spot famous for its Cantonese roast meats – soy chicken, roast duck (not the shredded, confit style served with pancakes, but served on the bone with glistening skin), siu yuk (succulent roast pork belly with crispy crackling), and char siu (sweet and savoury barbecued pork, often bright red in colour).
Growing up, siu yuk was the roast meat of choice in our household. Christened ‘bang bang meat’ by my then four-year-old sister due to the noise of my dad’s cleaver chopping the strips of cooked pork belly into bitesize pieces, we devoured this every other Saturday alongside a spread of homemade sweet and sour chicken, Malaysian curry, sweet and sticky spare ribs and stir fried vegetables.
During lockdown, however, it was another of the roast meats that I wanted to try my hand at: char siu. Char siu literally translates as fork roasted, named after the traditional method of cooking boneless strips of pork on long skewers over fire. It’s famous for its sweet, shiny glazed exterior, its appearance often artificially enhanced with red food colouring, so that when sliced you get a perfect ring of colour around the exterior of each slice.
Char Siu Pork with rice at Cafe TPT on Wardour Street
I first tried char siu when working at our local Chinese takeaway in my late teens. (Upon opening the door to receive an order one night, the delivery guy asked me on the spot if I was looking for a job and whether I could start immediately. This being a small town in the Fens, Chinese staff must have been hard to come and from my perspective getting a Saturday job the most competitive thing in the world - I accepted his offer without hesitation.) I worked the Saturday evening shift every week for a whole summer, initially packing steamed and fried rice into tin foil containers for each order, before eventually being promoted to delivery driver.
Every time I worked a shift, I was able to choose one dish from the menu to take home with me afterwards. One week, I ordered the char siu pork. Slices of sweet and sticky roasted pork, served on top of steamed white rice with the roasting juices poured over the top – it was like nothing else my provincial taste buds had ever tasted.
Fast forward to the summer of 2020 and I had another transcendental char siu experience, this time at the other end of the culinary scale as part of Borough Market restaurant Mei Mei’s 8-course bā tasting menu. Fillets of the finest tamworth pork were slowly cooked at height over a konro grill for the duration of our meal, with four succulent and tender slices served for the final savoury course with delicate pak choi and rice. Heading home that night I knew it was now time to attempt it myself.
Tamworth Char Siu at Mei Mei Bā in Borough Market
Different people use different cuts of pork for char siu, each with differing results – at one end of the scale juicy and fatty char siu belly, at the other, lean and tender pork loin. I’ve cooked this a few times and after seeking advice online have settled on neck, or collar, to achieve the best results at home. While char siu is traditionally a barbecued meat, you can achieve good results in a domestic oven, and the quantity of fat marbled through the neck means you can cook it slowly enough to achieve the charred exterior without worrying about it becoming tough.
Compared with the Hainan Chicken Rice recipe I shared a couple of months ago, this is a reasonably fuss free recipe that doesn’t take long to prepare and delivers big rewards for minimal effort. I urge you to give it a go!
Char Siu Pork
Ingredients
500g pork neck/collar, rind and most of the fat removed*
Marinade:
2 tbsp light soy sauce
1.5 tbsp shaoxing wine
2 tbsp hoisin sauce
1 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp rapeseed/sunflower oil
1/4 tsp Chinese five spice powder
1/2 tsp ground white pepper
2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
Method
Combine all of the marinade ingredients in a large bowl.
Add the pork and rub all over thoroughly. Transfer the pork and the marinade to a freezer bag and leave to marinade in the fridge overnight.
The next day, remove pork from the fridge at least half an hour before cooking and preheat your oven to 175c fan.
Fill a high-sided roasting tray with 2cm water. Remove the pork from the bag, reserving the marinade, and place the pork on a wire rack in the roasting tray so it sits above the water. When the oven is hot enough put the pork on the top shelf of the oven for 25 minutes.
Whilst the pork is in the oven, heat the marinade in a pan with an additional tablespoon of honey until it starts to bubble.
After 25 minutes, remove the pork from the oven and brush generously with the marinade, flip it over and brush the underside, then return to the oven for a further 15 minutes.
Remove from the oven and brush with the marinade all over again, flipping it over so that it’s the same way round as when you first put it in the oven. Increase the temperature to 200c and return the pork to the oven for a final 10 minutes to achieve a blackened curst.
Leave to rest for 15 minutes before carving into thin slices. Serve with steamed white rice and pak choi sautéed in garlic.
*It’s important that the pork neck is not rolled, as you want a long, flat cut of pork. You may need to ask ahead at your butcher for this. If they don’t have neck you could use shoulder, instead. Alternatively, you can use a single pork tenderloin, but the cooking times will need to be adjusted, as this cut is much leaner and not as forgiving if left in too long. I cooked it at 10 minutes at 180c before basting all over, increasing the temperature to 200c with the grill on high for a further 8-10 minutes. It’s harder to achieve the charred crust with tenderloin, but it’s very tasty nonetheless.
JW Recommends
We devoured the first three seasons in lockdown, so I was pretty excited to hear that the fourth season of Somebody Feed Phil is coming to Netflix just as the nights get longer and Tier 2 lockdown rules set in.
The series follows Everybody Loves Raymond founder Phil Rosenthal’s culinary adventures around a different city each episode; his enthusiasm for trying new things and love of people is truly infectious. I’m particularly looking forward to him eating his way around Singapore, and my keen eyes have also spotted him paying a visit to Cervantes in Rio de Janeiro, whose pork and pineapple sandwiches I wrote about in Issue 003. Tune in on Netflix from Friday 30 October.
Music for Cooking To
In homage to Hung’s reputation as a late-night spot, and with wistful nostalgia for a life lived post-10pm, this week’s playlist is an hour of deep and soulful house music, featuring late night grooves from Mr Fingers, Moodymann, Boof, Jayda G and more.
