How to Make The BEST Char Siu (Chinese BBQ Pork 叉烧) Simple, Easy Recipe

Hey guys, show of hands, how many of you out there love char siu or Chinese roast pork? Yeah, who doesn't love that stuff? If you don't know what char siu is, but you walked around Chinatown, then you have definitely seen it. You know, you walk past this window full of delicious meats, you got duck, chicken, and then you got the char siu. The characters char siu literally means fork roast, and that's basically how people used to cook it. And it has so many applications. You can put it inside buns, you can get a char siu ball, you can cook it in fried rice, you get char siu chow fun. And this is a very distinctive food item. It's red, it's always hanging on the window, when you bite into it, okay, that's where the magic happens. It's a little charred. If it's cooked right, it should never be dry, and the juice should flow when you bite into that piece of meat. So looking at the char siu, you might think that it's really complicated to cook, but I'm here to tell you, that is not so. So I'm going to show you how to make char siu, and you're going to be amazed at how easy it is. Let's get started. First of all, let's go over some of the ingredients you'll need. You need some honey, Chinese oyster sauce, Chinese cooking wine. If you don't have this, then you can use dry sherry as a substitute, salt, of course, dark soy sauce. This is a very crucial item that you'll need for char siu. This is fermented tofu, or fermented bean curds, and very specifically, you'll need the red kind. So this is red fermented bean curds. You can't just get the regular bean curds, you need the red fermented bean curds, because that's where the char siu gets a lot of its color. Sesame oil, Chinese five spice, molasses, you need some garlic, you'll need some sugar, and some paprika. And of course, you'll need the pig itself. I'm going to talk about this in just a second here. For the cookware, you'll need a big bowl, and you'll need a oven tray lined with foil, and you'll need some kind of rack, some kind of cooking rack so that your char siu, your pork, isn't touching the bottom of the tray, otherwise it's going to burn on one end. You don't want that. I found these in the Chinese grocery market. You see how it has the little stands? That's going to give me the separation between my meat and the bottom of the tray. So I just bought two of them, and I put them together to form one big roasting platform. You'll need a big bag. If you don't have a big bag, it's okay. I'm not actually sure I can use this because now I'm looking at this, I don't think my bag is big enough. It might be. We're going to give it a try. So let me talk about the pork that you'll need for your char siu, and this is very important. You cannot get a piece of pork that's just really lean, so no tenderloin. What I would recommend is pork butt or pork belly if you want your char siu to be fattier. I feel like the pork butt is a good meat in the middle. It's not too fatty. It's not too lean. So the pork butt has a nice piece of fat here, and that's going to be really important. We're going to use three pounds of pork for this recipe, and that's going to give you a lot of char siu to do a lot of good things with. Oh, hey guys. It's Future Mike. I came back in time to tell you guys something very important, okay? It's not about the winning lottery ticket or who wins the Super Bowl. I forgot to tell you that when we cut up the meat, we want to cut it up into about yay big, so maybe a couple inches wide and maybe one inch thick. So slices like this, and it's okay to cut, you know, this piece is more fatty and this piece is a little more lean, but because it's butt meat, it has, you know, fat layered throughout. So I'm going to have some pieces that are a little fattier, and I'm going to have some pieces that are a little more lean. For the marinade and sauce, we're going to add a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of Chinese five spice, tablespoon of sugar. Check out the fermented tofu. A lot of you might not have seen this up close before. See how red it is on the inside? So the majority of our char siu's red color is going to come from this, and we're going to place one full block of tofu in there. And you see that juice in there that's all nice and red? Yeah, we're going to take a tablespoon of that as well. So a tablespoon of the fermented tofu brine, three to four cloves of garlic, depending on how much you like garlic, one tablespoon Chinese oyster sauce, one tablespoon Chinese cooking wine, two tablespoons of soy sauce, one tablespoon of honey, one teaspoon paprika, one teaspoon sesame oil, two teaspoons of molasses, finally two tablespoons of warm water. Mix that all together. Now this is really important. You're going to take two tablespoons of this mixture and put it aside. After we finish the mixture, we're going to take our big bag. Yeah, if you don't have a big bag, it's okay. You can just use like a tray or something. Put the pork inside. Then we're going to take our sauce and dump it inside the bag. Sauce is in the bag. Make sure to squeeze all the air out. Just shift it around a bit so the sauce gets everywhere. Now you're going to throw this in the fridge and have it marinate for about 24 hours. And if you're not using a bag and you're using like a pan or something, that's great. Cover it up with plastic wrap. Key thing is, after about 12 hours, go in there and flip the meat so the other side gets a nice marinade. And if this was some kind of a Food Network show or some Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray stuff, I'm going to go into that fridge and be like, and I already marinated something from yesterday, so let's get this cooking. Yeah, I didn't do that. So I'm going to see you guys tomorrow. And the good thing about this being an online video is this. All right, it's been 24 hours. Let's take our pork out of the fridge and pop it into the oven. Here it is. There we go. All nice and marinated. And all I'm going to do is put this onto my makeshift roasting rack. I'm going to try to space it out as much as I can. So try to keep the pieces of pork away from each other. This way it can heat evenly. I'm going to slide this into the top shelf of the oven. I'm going to cook it at 500 for about 25 minutes. 25 minutes later, I'm going to baste, flip it over, put it back in. And then I'm going to cook it at about 450 for another 25 minutes. Before this goes into the oven, I'm going to add about half a cup of water onto my tray so the bottom of the tray doesn't burn. It doesn't smoke too much. After you take your pork out, don't throw this valuable juice away. You're going to baste with this. Pork goes onto your tray and it goes into the oven. Timer at 25 minutes and we're going to check on that in just a little bit. All right, first time out of the oven. Looking pretty good so far. So now what we're going to do is baste this and now we're going to flip it and baste this side as well. I'm just going to add another half a cup of water to the bottom of this tray. And this goes back into the oven, 450, another 25 minutes. That looks gorgeous. The final step of what we're going to do is we're going to take that, remember that two tablespoon of sauce we got last time before we put it into the bag? We're going to take that out. We're going to get a brand new brush. This is not contaminated with pig germs and we're going to just cover this in sauce one last time. Okay, I got to try some of this. Here we go. Mmm. Whoa. You know what? Oh. Mmm. That's a fatty piece. Absolutely amazing. I love my char siu. It's a little bit charred. You know what this means, don't you? That means you guys who don't have access to Chinatown or you're not in China, you're not in Hong Kong, you can now have char siu anytime you want. That's some restaurant quality char siu right there. This is absolutely delicious. It's not as red as some restaurant char siu. You guys know why? That's because they use a lot of food coloring. We're not using any of that. It still came out. The color is beautiful. This will be a big hit. Make this for dinner instead of like a usual pork chop. Instead of a pot roast, make some char siu. Your family's going to go bananas. Got to dip some in my hot oil. This is a magical combo right here. Love that. Mmm. That's amazing. I just want to try one of these pieces from that piece of pork that had a lot of fat. Take a look. A lot of people like lean char siu. I prefer fatty char siu. Let's try this out. Oh my goodness. That was so good. I think I inadvertently just dipped a T-bone. That fat, as soon as it entered your mouth, just melted. It just melted. It was like biting into a piece of fatty, porky heaven. If you're like me, you love fatty pork, as soon as this is done resting, cut off a piece from the fattiest end of the char siu and put it into your mouth. You will thank me. You know what I also think would be good? Take this, a couple of buns, so instead of pulled pork, put some char siu there, put some coleslaw on top, a little barbecue sauce maybe. That would be fantastic. This is so good, I'm about to go get a hanger. I'm about to hang this on my window, just like they do in the restaurant, so people walk by and they can look at my window and feel hungry. So those of you guys who live in Elmhurst, Queens, if you happen to walk by a window and you see a slab of char siu just randomly hang there on a makeshift wire hanger, yeah, that's my house. So guys, definitely go try this recipe out. As you saw, it wasn't difficult at all. It was actually pretty easy. And you can do so many things with this. Like I mentioned, you can make this into a char siu pork bun, which I will do a video on that later. You can make some char siu fried rice. You can make the flour buns I taught you and put the char siu inside. You can make the scallion pancakes I taught you and make a sandwich with the char siu. All the ingredients are in my description box. I put some Amazon links there for you as well, for those of you who don't have access to an Asian market. Like I said, it's super easy. Go try this recipe out and you won't have to travel all the way to Chinatown or China to have good quality char siu. Oh, and by the way, I just want to mention really quick, I did start a brand new vlogging channel. The link is in the description box. I started this channel because there's certain things in my life that don't really fit into any one of my mini channels. So all those things will now go on to the vlog channel. I'll keep that updated as much as I can. So please check it out. If you like it, please subscribe. I would really appreciate that. Thank you so much for watching this video and thank you so much for checking out my vlogging channel, guys. See you later.