Melt-in-Your-Mouth Chinese Pork Belly with Preserved Mustard 梅菜扣肉 Hakka Mei Cai Kou Rou • CNY Recipe

Hi and welcome to Spice and Pans. Today we'll be cooking Hakka Braised Pork Belly with Preserved Mustard Greens or Mei Cai Kou Rou. So let's start cooking. Now we'll start to poach our pork. I'm using my 32 cm non-stick wok from Shogun by La Gourmet. This is part of the Midori series. Add in your pork. I have with me over here 600 grams of pork belly. Skin side down, put it in. Don't turn on the flame first. This is very important. Add in one thumb size ginger, sliced thinly like this. Add in two tablespoons of Chinese rice wine and then we turn on the flame to medium. Please make sure that the water covers the pork. The reason why we don't turn on the heat or wait for the water to heat up before we put in the pork is so that the scum, the blood from the pork can slowly be released once the water gets heated up. This is very important so please follow this step. We'll wait for this to come to a boil and then we'll boil this further for another 20 minutes. I'll show you how they look like in a while. As you can see the water is boiling. We'll still cook the pork for another 20 minutes. In the meanwhile you can remove all this foam. I'm removing the foam because I want my pork to be really clean and this will also show me how clean is my pork because I will be just steaming my pork later and I really want them to be very very clean. I'll show you how they look like in a while. 20 minutes is up and we'll remove the pork. We'll wash the pork and then we'll leave it to cool for a minute or two before we proceed with the next step. We can discard this water too. I'll see you back in a while. The pork has cooled down already. Now we just need to poke some holes into it and coat this with a little bit of dark soy sauce. Using something like this or your fork, just generously poke into the skin. The purpose of this is to let the skin puff up when we deep fry it and of course for the dark soy sauce to have a better coating on the skin. Just generously poke it. Once you're done with this, I'll show you the next step. Now we'll brush some dark soy sauce on the skin of the pork. Using a brush, just slightly brush it. This will darken up the skin and it will make the dish very beautiful. After you're done with this, we'll just let this rest for approximately 10 minutes before we fry the pork. We'll now start to deep fry our pork. Put enough oil in your wok so that it can cover up the skin. Do not turn the heat on right now. Put in your pork skin side down like this. The reason why we don't want to turn on the flame right now is because this will pop easily so it's a bit dangerous if you were to turn on the flame right now. Put the lid on, turn the heat on to medium or medium low and when we hear the first pop, we'll time this for two minutes and then we'll turn off the flame. I'll let you see how it looks like in a while. In the meanwhile, prepare some ice water. We'll soak the pork skin into the ice water so that it will puff up really beautifully. I'm starting to hear the sound of the oil crackling. I'm just waiting for the big pop to happen. I'm not sure if you heard it but there's some popping already and we'll start to time our pork for two minutes. I'll see you back in a while. Two minutes up. Don't remove the cover. Turn off the flame. We'll wait for all the seasoning and popping to die down before we remove the pork. I'll show you how it looks like in a while. Now you can hear that the popping has died down. We'll remove the cover and remove the pork. Remember to submerge the pork skin into the ice water so that I'll soak the pork in the ice water for about five minutes or so and I'll see you back in a while to show you the next step. This is the pork that we have deep fried just now and we're prepared to cut this now. As you can see, the skin has puffed up beautifully. Now for the pork, we need to cut against the grain so we're going to cut it this way. All right so about the size will be half a width of my finger so that this will be really tender. Don't cut this too thick. Skin side up, just cut it down. This is the kind of thickness that we want, not too thick. Continue with the rest and I'll show you the next step after this. Now that we have cut up the pork, we'll marinate them. Add in one and a half tablespoon of oyster sauce, one and a half tablespoon of light soya sauce, two tablespoons of dark soya sauce, one teaspoon of five spice powder, one teaspoon of sugar, half a cup of water or 125 milliliters of water. We want some sauce with our dish. Add in a few dashes of pepper. Mix them up well. After you have mixed them up well, we'll let the pork soak in the marinade for approximately 20 to 30 minutes. I'll show you how it looks like in a while. Now we will start to fry our preserved vegetables. This is how a mei tai look like or we call this preserved vegetables. This is not to be confused with the salted vegetable. These are the dry type. There's a lot of salt and sugar on it. There's two types available. One is the salted one and one is the sweet type. I'm using the sweet type. Using the same wok, turn on the heat to medium low. Add in one small piece of cinnamon bark, about the size of your last finger, and one piece of star anise. Dry fry them for a while until we can smell the beautiful fragrance that's coming out from here. This will take about two minutes or so. Just move them around. We don't want to burn them. When you can start to smell the fragrance coming out from the cinnamon bark as well as the star anise, we'll add in our preserved vegetables. I've chopped them up. 300 grams of preserved vegetables. I've soaked this for approximately 35-40 minutes itself. Please do the same too. Wash them really really nicely because there's a lot of debris in them. Pour them all in. The reason why we did not add in any oil is because later when we steam the preserved vegetables with the pork belly, there's already oil. So we don't want to have too much of oil. Make this as healthy as we can. Add in four pieces of garlic, peeled, as well as a few pieces of young ginger. We'll need to fry this until they are a little bit dry. This will take a couple of minutes. When they are dry, then they can absorb the beautiful sauce coming out from the pork. Move them around. Don't burn them. Maintain the heat at medium low. When you move them around and you don't feel too much of a weight, that means the preserved vegetables are done. I'll show you how they look like in a while. As you can see, I don't feel too much of a resistance as I flip the preserved vegetables. These are almost done. Add in half a teaspoon of sugar to balance out the taste and also add in one tablespoon of light soy sauce. Although these are the sweet type, it is still very salty and we need to actually balance out the taste. The soy sauce is actually to increase the fragrance of the dish and this is a very vital ingredient for this. All right, now we'll just remove this and I'll show you the next step. Before we steam the pork, let's assemble it up first. Using your steaming bowl, we'll line the pork up. I'll show you how I do this. Just stack them like this first. Find a bowl that can fit all your ingredients in and I'm going to use a pressure cooker to steam this. Make sure that your bowl is able to fit into your steamer and then just transfer it to your steaming bowl like this. Next, we'll add in our preserved vegetables or mei cai. Try to fill in all the crevices over here. Pack them in. Make sure you fill in into all the gaps. Fill them in. Pack them in tight so that it will be beautiful when you showcase this later to your guests. Although this dish requires you to deep fry the pork, but it's relatively easy because you can put the cover on. Pack them in tightly. Now we'll pour the sauce in. Pour everything in. This sauce is really really good. Now that this is done, we'll prepare to steam this. Now we'll steam the dish. I'm using a multi-cooker from La Gourmet. This is a very versatile cooker. It can cook congee, steam, braise, open lid cooking and even make your soup. So we're going to use this to steam our dish. Have a steamer rack in. Put our dish in. Cover it up with another plate because we don't want the water droplets to dilute the sauce that we have. The lid on and lock it. Turn it on. I'm going to switch to steaming mode and I'm going to turn the timer up to 50 minutes because I really want my pork to be very very tender. And now all we have to do is just wait for this to be cooked. If you're using a normal pot over the stove, I would suggest you to steam this for at least one and a half hours in order to have the pork really tender. I'll see you back in a while. We'll pressure steam the pork for 15 minutes and let it sit until the steam dissipates on its own. We'll now take off the cover and remove the pork. Carefully remove the covering plate. Smells really really good. We'll now remove the pork. To serve your dish, take a serving plate. Make sure that your serving plate is bigger than your steaming bowl. Cover it up like this and proceed to pour the sauce into a bowl first. Try to remove as much of the braising sauce as possible because we will need to flip this over and we want everybody to be safe while doing that. Once you're done with this, make sure that your plate and your bowl is level like this and in one swift motion just turn it this way and there you have it. Now all we have to do is just pour the sauce back to the dish. Look at how beautiful this is. Extremely delicious. And now the dish is done. Let's have a taste. Smells really really good. Let's give this a taste. Very flavorful. Very very tender. Excellent with steamed rice. Oh my, this is really really delicious. Very yummy. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you like our video. Do click like on our video and do subscribe to our channel and now it's your turn to cook. See you, bye bye. I think I can finish three bowls of rice with this.