Hong Kong-Style Pork Chops With Onions - Why It Works with Lucas Sin - Food52

Welcome back to the Food52 Test Kitchen. Today we are making pork chops. Specifically, we're making pork chops because I'm going to explain why Chinese marinades work. Chinese marinades oftentimes are a little bit more complicated than most of the home cooking western marinades that you'll find. They have a multitude of ingredients but each and every ingredient has its own purpose and each and every ingredient is quite important. Hopefully this video will explain why each and every one of those ingredients work. Here are the pork chops today. These are what are sold in the U.S. as pork shoulder chops. Now most of us in the U.S. associate pork chops with what are actually called pork loin chops. Pork loin chops come from towards the back of the pig and nice uniform, round, white-ish loin chops with the bone on the side. Those chops are very very lean and honestly not my preference and also not the preference of most Hong Kong people. These type of shoulder chops which usually come from sometimes called the Boston butt or the CT butt or the pork shoulder, there are all sorts of names for it, come from further up towards the front leg of the pig. So what you'll end up getting is a piece of pork that is well marbled, a little bit darker in color, more flavorful and more tender. In order to tenderize your pork chops there are two approaches. The first is physical, the second one is chemical. The physical tenderizing of the pork chop is with the back of your knife. Some people like to use a mallet but basically what we're doing is loosening up some of the fibers in the meat. With the dull backside of your knife I'm just hitting the pork chop not to get it to split in half to make it a little bit bigger and give it a little bit more surface area. I literally am just hammering it this way so that it becomes larger in size. Usually the tradition or rather the practice is to go crossways to make sure you hit the fibers that run both directions and then flip it over and do the other side as well. A good benchmark for whether you've hammered this enough is that your pork chop should almost be double in size. There is one. These little bits of tendon by the way you're free to carve out and get rid of. I kind of like them when they fry up because it's a little bit of a chewy bite. Some people don't like that. Next step we are going to be marinating our pork. Pork chops in to a bowl. Flavor first. Soy sauce. Light soy sauce is a our source of sodium and our source of umami here today. So light soy sauce goes in. Second thing in terms of gaminess. Gaminess is that flavor that you get from meat sitting around for too long. Maybe it's freezer burnt a little bit. Maybe it just hasn't been treated very well. It's not very high quality. So on and so forth. There are a couple ways we get rid of gaminess. The go-to for most Chinese marinades is Shaoxing wine which is a Chinese yellow wine. Chinese rice wine. That goes in and to balance that out a little bit of white sugar. You can add salt to this recipe as well but there is enough salt in the soy sauce and for this particular recipe I'm not adding that much salt because our sauce is going to be quite salty and it's going to bind everything together with the onions. Now in terms of texture. First and foremost, cornstarch. Cornstarch does two things. Number one it creates a little bit of a thin coating around our meat so that when we sear it at high heat it actually protects the meat a little bit. Second of all that cornstarch will also help bind some of the liquid in our marinade to the meat itself so that you basically form a little bit of a slurry. Now a little bit of oil. This oil will help your pork chop slide around a little bit and it'll just help the pork chop prevent it from sticking to each other before it hits the pan. And then last thing is the baking soda. So now is when we talk about the chemical tenderization of meat. Baking soda these days given how easy it is to get in households is the easiest and most direct way to season and tenderize your pork. Now baking soda unfortunately has a little bit of that alkaline high pH almost bitter astringent nasty taste. Once you taste baking soda alone or you taste it when people have used too much of it you'll taste it everywhere. It's important that whenever you use baking soda that number one you don't use too much. Number two that it's maybe covered up with a sauce. If you're trying to tenderize a pork chop and just sear it off as is without a sauce on top of it I wouldn't use baking soda. An alternative that is made from fruit that I've started using recently because I've picked this up from a Malaysian chef is actually papaya. A lot of Southeast Asian countries like to use papaya especially green papaya. This is orange papaya. We'll explain it later. But a lot of Southeast Asian countries like to use papaya or fruits like papaya such as kiwi for tenderizing their meat. There are enzymes in these fruits and papaya specifically it's papain. Somebody fact check me on the pronunciation p-a-p-a-i-n. I believe it's papain or papain. But papain you can buy it as a powder as well. The enzyme in the papain is the enzyme in papaya that will help tenderize your meat. It'll help break open those fibers at a smaller level than us hammering it with the back of a cleaver. Downsides of the papaya is that papaya is a little bit sweet and it's got a little bit of fruitiness. You don't want those flavors. They're not going to work. But today we're going to be using baking soda. Not too much of it. So just carefully just a little bit sprinkle it over the surface of the pork. Once all of your ingredients are in your we squeeze and massage that meat quite well. There is an allergy to really massaging or overhandling your meat in fear of changing its texture but what we're doing here in this context is actually deliberately trying to change its texture. So therefore massaging it we're trying to get all of those ingredients evenly coated but we're trying to work all of that flavor and that chemical change into the pork itself. Just squeeze it in make sure it's nice and evenly distributed and we're going to put this in the fridge to marinate for at least 30 minutes. Overnight is good as well and a little note that overnight marinade is my dad used to marinate all of the meat for most of the week cooking on Sunday nights so that whenever we came home from school we could cook ourselves dinner with meat that was already marinated. The next step is to get everything else ready for our pork chop dish. Pork chop with onions. Onions. So these are yellow onions. This dish in Cantonese is called Yeung Chong Chew Pa. Yeung Chong is western onion. Chew Pa is pork chop. It's a classic combination in a lot of our daily restaurants, our diners. These types of restaurants are called Cha Chan Teng. Cha Chan Teng are my favorite type of restaurants in the world. I grew up on them and what they serve is Hong Kong style western food. So it's a Hong Kong interpretation of European food as by way of British colonization. So a lot of the ingredients that we use in Cha Chan Teng cooking are really quite interesting. A lot of shelf-stable products, a lot of sort of European seasonings end up becoming a significant part of the Cha Chan Teng flavor profile that is then changed and evolved by the Hong Kong people for the Hong Kong palate. So I'm cutting these onions. I am going to sear them off at high heat and I want a little bit of texture so I'm not going as thin as I can. Now we're cooking at high heat today which means everything needs to hit the pan at the same time. Otherwise things are going to burn while we're trying to get things out of bottles. So best to mise out all of your ingredients ahead of time. First is oyster sauce. Oyster sauce is a well-balanced sauce and the backbone of the umami and savory notes for this sauce. Second thing, soy sauce, a little bit of savory notes, salty stuff, you already know. Now more interesting, ketchup. Ketchup is so important to Hong Kong style diners and Hong Kong cooking. It's an instant tomato flavor for whatever reason. It is also perfectly sweet and sour at the same time. We love using it for body and for color so there is a lot of hidden ketchup uses not only in tomato sauces but sauces like this. Shaoxing wine that's going to go into the deglaze to get rid of some of that gaminess but also help give lend us a little bit of complexity and sweetness. Chicken stock for volume, a little bit of gelatin in there for the body as it's going to cook up but also a little bit of extra flavor. Now really interesting is Worcestershire sauce. Worcestershire sauce is really quite popular in a lot of Shanghainese and Hong Kong cooking. Interestingly there is a type of Worcestershire that's made in China and a lot of people in Shanghai specifically used to call this, I still call this, spicy soy sauce. So la jiang you. Okay so just a couple of dashes of that and then finally just to tie it all together. By the way this is almost a version of a famous black pepper steak sauce which is one of the Hong Kong steak house's favorites. So a generous amount of black pepper. All right beautiful sauce, a little bit brown, a little bit red. You might be asking yourself looking at this thing, dang this is super watery. What are we going to do? What episode are we in now? This must be like episode 37 or something of this show. We should know by now that the best way to thicken these sauces while you're cooking is a starch slurry. So a little bit of a cornstarch slurry, one-to-one cornstarch to water. If you have potato starch, use potato starch. It is my preferred starch but if you have cornstarch that is fine too. Mix it well. Make sure that all that cornstarch is dispersed in cold water so that when it hits a hot pan it'll do its thing and it'll seize up properly. Make a little bit more than you think you'll need that way you can pour it in in intervals. Now that we have our slurry, we have our sauce, we have our onions, we have our pork chop, next step start cooking. Okay let's cook these pork chops. Today we are cooking these pork chops in a cast iron pan. You need a pan that can get hot and hold that heat while you add cold things to it. Cast iron for most western style kitchens is your best bet. Now we're going to get this hot until it's smoking but let's just give it a little bit of oil before we really get cranking. When we first put these pork chops into the hot pan they're going to seize up a little bit and we want as much contact with the surface of the pan as possible so let's press them down a little bit. Same thing as when we're searing or we're stir-frying anything else you want to make sure that that oil is shimmering before it goes in even smoking. Hold it down before it starts going crazy. Just press it in. One of the good things about pans is that while they're searing they're going to hold on by these little air pockets and a little bit of that charring to the shape of your pork chop. Especially in a cast iron pan because you've added cornstarch they have something to hold on to so they won't shrink super super quickly and warp and therefore give you a bad sear. They'll release themselves as they continue to cook and as you smell it you're going to smell a little bit of char you're going to smell a little bit of that caramelization and the activation of those flavors which means that you can start checking them slowly releasing them with a spatula and then flipping. Look at how beautiful of that sear that is. Okay it's been about one or two minutes because of how thin these pork chops are they're almost done. What I'm looking for is an even nice brown sear on both sides and I'm actually looking for a medium well if not a well done cook. Here's one nice and tender. I will say some people consider this type of tenderness artificial because of the baking soda and the tenderizing agent. In the sense it is artificial because a human was involved in the tenderizing of the pork chop but I think it's just a very fine line between it's a very fine line between pork chops being salted with baking soda and being like rubbery versus them being nice and soft and and appropriate so I think these are great. These are the way they're supposed to be. Okay now we're going to set these pork chops aside let them rest just like we would our steaks so that the moisture inside can settle and then we're going to build basically a pan sauce inside of our pan. We're going to saute all of our onions. There should be a little bit of fat leftover some fat that might have leached off of the pork chops. If they seem very very dry feel free to add a little bit more oil. As you cook these onions the onions will start to release moisture and that moisture is going to help deglaze your pan therefore picking up those nice brown delicious bits on the bottom of the pan which the French refer to as fond. The fond if anything is a really important part of building flavor for pan sauces. Now I want a little bit of bite in my onions. I don't want them fully caramelized. Onions on the heat sauce mixed well that's going to go in. It's going to bubble. It's going to reduce. It's going to evaporate. I'm just going to toss everything together. You can smell the acidity from the ketchup. You can smell the savoriness. That's really wonderful. It's already at a boil because at the right temperature now is the time to add the cornstarch in stages. Try to aim for three. One. Stir. Let the starch gelatinize. Let it come up to heat before you decide whether you need to add more. Just a touch more for good luck. That's the onion sauce done. Ketchup, black pepper, Worcestershire. Now we're going to plate. We're going to plate it like a workman's blue collar lunch which is the way that it is. This is like the one of the most democratic of the people, for the people, by the people type of dish you can get in Hong Kong. The pork chops themselves on the bottom. If you have some gnarly but delicious extra caramelized bits hide those on the bottom. This portion I think should be two pork chops per person. Sometimes you can pay extra for a fried egg which would be really good because that runny yolk. And then our beautiful black peppery Worcestershire ketchup onion sauce right over the top. Pork chop rice looks good. It's the right consistency. The glaze is honestly beautiful. There is no garnish to this. Don't add half a sprig of cilantro to this at all. This is the way that it's supposed to be. Just this. Cool. What I'm expecting is a well-done thoroughly cooked pork chop that is still nice and tender and not ridiculously chewy because of our cut of pork but also our marinating technique. Good. When you eat it there's a little bit of snap. It's not rubbery. It's just nice and tender and compact and dense and flavorful. Everything that we put in that marinade you can taste and you realize contributes to either the flavor or the texture of the pork chop. This is a classic pork chop marinade but you can use this as a starting point for any of your meat marinades, for your stir fries or any other application. If you like this recipe get the recipe on food52.com or in the description box below. If you like pork recipes or you want to know a little bit more about pork chops or different cuts of pork, we did a fabulous episode the other day with our friends over at Deluxe Meat Market that describes and shows you the difference between western-style butchery and chinese-style butchery. It's really great. Check that one out.