Char Siu | Our 50 year old family recipe! | The Woks of Life

Okay. Quiet on the set. Quiet on the set. No whispering. Hi everyone. Everybody loves Chinese roast pork or char siu, char siu in Cantonese. And everybody should be making it at home. These days char siu has gotten quite costly. So if you make it at home, you save tons of money. You get your fresh char siu and a lot of people have said it's better than some of their local restaurants. You know, if you've got your favorite restaurant or a local Chinatown spot though, don't be afraid to walk in and just have a char siu. We do it all the time and support your local Chinatowns. By the way, summer's coming up, can be cooked on the grill and we have separate recipes for how you cook on the grill. So whatever you got at home, whether it's the oven, the air fryer, or the grill outside, whether you're using pork or whether you're using chicken, make char siu at home. It's easy. All right, so let's talk about selecting meat, right? Today we have a pork butt boneless shoulder roast. If you want to save a buck, you can get a whole fresh ham. We have a video on how to break that down. Hey, can I use tenderloin? Can I use pork loin? You can. These are leaner cuts of meat, so you have to make sure you have your expectations set. They're going to be not as juicy, not as flavorful, so I would save that for another meal. Same thing goes for pork belly. We've got tons of other pork belly recipes, much better used in those other recipes. So the char siu and the silio, or foil as we call it in Cantonese, they're both in our cookbook, The Walks of Life, recipes to know and love from the Chinese-American family. That's us. So be sure to get a copy if you haven't gotten one yet. All right, so you've got your meat now and the overall process is you got to do this the day before. You're going to break down this meat, you're going to cut it into pieces, you're going to make your marinade, you're going to marinate the meat, and then you're going to put it in the fridge overnight. And then the next day, you're ready to roast it. You're going to use a rack with some water on it in a pan, and you could use a sheet pan or a deeper pan, and you're going to roast it at high heat, then lower the temperature, and during that time, you're going to baste it, and it's easy as that. The best thing about making char siu at home is that instead of making three pounds, you can make a double recipe and cook six pounds of it and freeze the rest. And I would recommend that you cook it first and freeze it because if you marinate it and you forget about it and you leave it over for one week or two weeks or longer, it'll get cured and it gives you a different taste and you won't taste that fresh pork flavor. You can make pork fried rice, pork lo mein, you can make char siu bao, you can make roast pork with Chinese vegetables, which I love. Make roast pork puffs for your next dinner party. You can do just about any stir fry with roast pork. We're ready to make the marinade, and here's what you need. Some sesame oil, shaoxing wine, some soy sauce, hoisin sauce, a little grandma molasses, five spice powder, a white pepper, and some maltose or honey. Maltose is basically a malted sugar, and it's super, super thick. It gets super sticky. See, you can see some of these strings already here, and that makes your char siu really super sticky and nice. If you don't have maltose, use honey and you'll be fine. Now, I like to use molasses, and this is grandma's molasses that is the gold standard since 1890, she said. It's not sponsored, okay. Add sweetness, adds depth of flavor, and a little bit of color to it. If you really don't have the molasses, then you can use dark brown sugar, and that works as well. So most char siu is very red, and that's due to red food coloring. You can add it if you want, but if you're averse against that, you can just leave it out. It won't be as red. You can use a little bit of beet juice. Oops, I forgot the garlic. You actually need three cloves of garlic, finely minced. You sounded like Emeril. You were like garlic. Garlic. Okay, sugar first, and we need a quarter cup of sugar or four tablespoons. One, two, three, four. Okay, we need two teaspoons of salt, quarter teaspoon of white pepper, half teaspoon sesame oil, one tablespoon of Shaoxing wine, a tablespoon of soy sauce, one tablespoon of hoisin sauce, and two teaspoons of molasses. One, and that's two. Next, the garlic, and finally a little bit of food coloring, eight drops. Okay, we're ready for the pork shoulder out. So this is deboned. Yeah, you got a nice cut. This is a really nice cut of pork, and this, by the way, is about four and a half pounds. So you might say, what do you do with this? It's this big piece of pork. The bone has been taken out, and you've got this sinew here. You can cut some of this off if you like. This is just hanging out here. I'm going to cut this off because it's kind of tough. This is a good place to separate it, so I'm going to cut this right here. I've got some fat on here, marbling in here. So you want your tasio to be two to three inches wide, but if you have a little bit wider piece, it's okay. And the first thing I look for is these are these muscle seams. So I'm going to actually cut the muscle seam, seam here, just like that, and sort of butterfly it. So now I've got my first piece of tasio. It's a little bit long, so I'm going to make it about, cut it right about in half, cut like that. That's one. That's a big old chunk. It is a big old chunk. I see another seam here. I'm going to do this, and it's going to kind of be a natural butterfly. And what happens is that these muscle seams will get exposed to the heat, and they'll naturally break down. And you notice it's about like an inch and a half thick, two inches. It's just about an inch and a half thick. So this one's a little bit too wide. I'm going to cut it right in half. We've got two pieces here. Now this is kind of small, but it's okay. You're never going to get a perfect piece. This is a more characteristic piece. You probably don't want to go any thinner than this. And it'll roast faster. That's about 39 ounces. So we need another eight ounce piece. Yeah, this can be a little bit of an art or science, but you know, I remember my father, he just used to cut it without hesitation. Somehow he knew the 10 ounces. So we got about 40, 49, 50 ounces here. And I'm going to save this other piece for cooking later. You're not really doing yourself any favors with this tiny font. See the paper? So next, we'll just put this pork in the bowl, and then just add the marinade in. I want to get every drop. Well, almost every drop. Arguably, using your hands is faster. So you know what? I'm going to do that. You just want to make sure the marinade's all worked into the pork. I was mixing it, and I said, hey, we're, seems to be missing something. And we were. Spice powder was missing. Now it's right. Now, a plate on top of the bowl, and into the fridge. It goes overnight. I've always wanted to do this, where the cooking shows. They said, well, I just made this batch yesterday. That's exactly what I did. Marinated this char siu yesterday, put it in the fridge. And today's batch that we made, that we marinated, I'm going to put that in the fridge for the next day. And you see what's happened is that some liquid has come out. We're going to mix it again. And then this liquid here, we're going to reserve for basting. So you don't have raw pork in your basting liquid. But what we're going to do is pour that off into a bowl. We're going to microwave it, or cook it on the pan. Cook out that rawness, and then add the maltose and use that as a basting liquid. Okay, the first thing out of the fridge, what you want to do is you do want to mix. Make sure, because it's dried out a little bit on top. So you want to give the char siu some room on the rack. These are really nice pieces here. Okay, look at that. Now, here's the marinade that's left. So this is the marinade that we're going to put in a bowl, mix with the maltose. So the next thing we're going to do is we're going to preheat the oven to 475. After it's preheated, I'm going to add water to the pan, just so that just enough water covers the bottom of the pan. You don't want the oil and the marinade to burn in the pan and to smoke. You've got a nice moist environment in the oven that won't dry out your char siu. Our oven's preheated to 475. I'm going to put it in. And right now what I'm going to do is pour the water in. Best to use hot water. So we'll keep the temperature at 475 for the first 10 minutes, and then we're going to turn it down to 375. And roast it for a total of 25 minutes. Really? You want that detail? Well, yeah. Tell the people. What's going on? We're going to roast it at 475 for 10 minutes, and we're going to turn it down to 375 and roast it for another 15 minutes. All right, so we've got the marinade from the pork. So I'm going to hit this in the microwave for probably 30 seconds, and then we're going to add the maltose. 30 seconds is plenty of time. Oh yeah, it's bubbling all right. We're going to take our maltose. Maltose looks really thick like this, and if it hardens, add just a little bit of water, microwave for about 10 seconds, and this is what makes that pork nice and sticky. All right, I'm going to mix this into this hot marinade. We'll get our brush for the basting, and we're ready to go. Did you put a timer on this? No. Oh. 375. I'm going to check the pan. The water is a little bit of steam out there, but it's kind of dried up on this side, so I'm going to add a little bit more. At this point, you want to make sure you add boiling water because you don't want to cool off that pan. You want to cool off that oven. It's going to throw off your cooking times. All right, it's been 25 minutes, so we're going to take it out. Careful, there's still a little bit of water in here, so you get this pale look. It's okay. It's all good, nice and moist. Flip this over. I'm going to open the oven again. Set our timer for 15 minutes. All right, so we're going to take our char siu out and give it a baste. All right, make sure to baste it on both sides. Looking good. Another 10 minutes in the oven, and we'll be ready to go. All right, it's been another 10 minutes. We're going to take a look at it, and this looks pretty good. I'm going to let it rest with a light cover over it, keep it warm. Okay, we'll see you in about 5 to 10 minutes. Ready to cut. All right, so we've got our char siu. It's rested, and I'm going to actually baste it again with the pan sauce. We're going to make a one-plate rice plate, char siu phat. Bed of rice and some veggies. Got to get a good amount of veggies, and this veggie was just stir-fried in a little bit of garlic and salt. I'm going to make nice slices. Oh yeah, and it's rested very nicely, so all the juices are in there. Not too much is running off the board. Basically, if you see a lot of other videos and the juices pouring out, they're cutting it right out of the oven just to show the juices, but you want those juices right inside your pork. You don't want them out on the cutting board. Put it right here, right on top, just like that. Okay, that's nice, and if you want to use a little bit of your pan juices, you can do that now, and some restaurants serve it with sweet soy, so if you like that, you can do that too. It's a little char siu phat rice plate, so let's give this a try. Really nice. For the amount of char siu that we made, you probably can make six of these plates. 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