Cantonese Crispy Pork and Char Siu

Roasting, everybody's roasting. Welcome back to the Masterclass, welcome back to the channel. This one is lesson two, we're on to lesson two of roasting and we're, you know, I'm keeping this, let's say, module very simple because roasting is simple and it shouldn't be too complicated. As we've seen in lesson one, poaching your meat before or you roast it is a very classic technique in Chinese cuisines. I've got here a joint of pork shoulder with things like char siu, the barbecue pork. We'd usually use pork collar but, you know, pork neck, similar to pork shoulder, a little bit more marbling, not quite as thick marbling as the but shoulder works just fine. You can't get the neck cut that easily here in the UK. So there's plenty of meat on it and it gives options of two simple roast meats that you'll always see hanging in the windows of the Chinese restaurants and that is the char siu, the barbecue pork and the salted crackling style crispy pork. Of course, traditionally you'd use pork belly for the crispy pork but at home I use this shoulder joint a lot because it just works and it's slightly less fatty. The fat's not in like very uniform layers, it's rather kind of like woven in and out of the meat or this cut of meat. What you want with the crispy pork is to have the crackling and any meat that's attached to it in a similar sort of thickness as possible across the piece. So I'm just going to take this extra bit of flesh off that fat there and then I'll use this fat with this layer of meat for my crackling or my salted crispy pork. So essentially showing you two dishes here out of one piece of meat that are both going to be slow roasted at 130 degrees C before I then finish them off and get that either charred finish or crispy skin finish on a much higher heat using this roasting technique. This pork fat and the skin that's going to go in for its blanch, similarly to the blanching of half of that roast chicken in lesson one. So that's going to go in skin side down into this pot of boiling hot water for about five minutes, let it bubble away and that will just tighten up that fat, bring out the fatty impurities, you'll see the scum of that fat coming up to the top of the water and we'll obviously remove that, get rid of all that scum and then the rest of it I'm going to make up for like a home style char siu and char siu is usually in like long sort of lengths like so of pork neck or pork shoulder. So these will go into a sauce that I'll make up in a second. Not dissimilar to any other cooking like if you can sort of even out your pieces of meat, each piece should then cook more evenly across, so if you can unravel your piece of meat so there's one thickness across the cut, each cut means that every piece will come out as tender or not than the other. There we go, so we've got nice equal thickness of pork shoulder and you can see I've got, that was about two kilos total of meat, see how much char siu I'm going to get out of that, you know, two-thirds of that joint. So this is a mum recipe this and it's kind of traveled to many many different parts of the world because it's so easy and just so tasty. So thick to thin, two to one, that's four, five, six. So I've done six spoons of sugar, I'm going to do the same with the thicker ingredients, so hoisin sauce, one, two, three, four, five, six and then also in the thicker ingredient camp some ketchup, so let's do very roughly one, two, three, four, five, six and then because I've done six of the thicker, two to one, so three of the thin dark soy for some real nice charred colour, so three of those, some rice vinegar, one, two, three. If you want you can use some light soy as well and it'll sort of create more of a balanced saltiness, so three of those in there. So give that a good mix, this video is definitely more about the sort of technique of getting these two dishes out of a slow roasting technique, which is very very simple. In old school Chinese kitchens in like Guangdong province, you know the southern part of China and Hong Kong, the Canton, you'd have like old big roasting ovens where the meats would be hanging and wind drying whilst they're being roasted at the same time and that what that does is that you get this very very tender slow cooking process of the meat and it's where the slow cooking gives it or creates that tenderness and really breaks down the meat over time whilst getting this perfect char on the outside. I actually find with a domestic fan oven it has a similar sort of slightly drying sort of feel to the outside of the meat too, so it does work well and you don't have to like over worry, especially when you're slow cooking something like this, with whether the edges of the meat are going to dry out as much as you want because it definitely does, it works, works a treat. So what I do is on this slow cooking I put the oven on fan first on the low heat so 130 degrees on the fan and then to crisp up the fat or the or char the edges around this char seal, I'll change the function of the oven to top and bottom heat only without the fan to get that char or the crisping right without sort of the oven wanting to kind of almost spittle the fat out at you and set off the smoke alarm. My pork, the sort of fatty part of the shoulder here I'm just going to start to bring together now, like because that it's a rolled shoulder joint it's not as flat as a piece of pork belly would be so it's got this end here that's kind of lifting up, ideally you want to get the skin as as flat as it can be so that it gets a nice even cook so I'm not going to waste any of this but I will take this end off and we'll deal with this the same way but we'll it means that we've got a nice like even hopefully a more even cook so I'm just going to score into the fat of the skin here and you'll notice once you've blanched your fat like I have it's much easier to slice into the skin or poke it if you've got one of those nail pieces those nail sort of hammers so I go for nice diagonal scores across the piece of meat to allow for as much salt as possible to then penetrate the fat and then bring out the moisture of that fat which is what helps of course with the drying of the skin and that is how you make that beautiful perfect crackling that really has a crunching sound and texture when you bite into it give that an open up you'll see all the cuts like so flavor wise for this contrary to the chassil which is very strong in flavor from all those sauces and the sugar or whatever this really should be very mild and simple you know a good pinch of five spice around the meat and then you can salt that too but don't over salt the meat you now need enough salt over each and every crack and crevice of that pork skin to make sure that you can really rub that in well and draw out that moisture from the fat you'll see immediately that fat start to glisten because that salt is drawing out the moisture this piece of pork I'm going to sit nicely on this trivet here let that sit at least for 10-15 minutes before you pop it in the oven or you can pat it dry as the the salt is bringing out more of that moisture but when you're slow cooking these two dishes you know on a fan oven I find that actually the fan oven over that period of an hour and a half or two hours will dry that skin that extra excess moisture out anyway and so you don't have to worry about it having to leave it to sit for too long at all now this pork has had a good two hours actually and the chassil definitely needs turning because you can see that char on the outside even at 130 low slow heat it gets that lovely caramelization so I'm going to turn this chassil with the crispy pork it's actually quite it all dried out now the skin and I'll show you that in a second I'm going to whack the oven up change the setting from fan to top and bottom heat only no fan so that the fat doesn't kind of all spit everywhere so this now is going to go into the oven 230 degrees on that function to char the outside of this chassil and I'll show you the skin in a second skin on this is ready to crackle but because it's on that low and slow which has really cooked that meat to a nice almost like like falling off the bone if it was on the bone texture now at that 230 degrees c it will crisp up very quickly so 10 to 15 minutes to crisp up the top look at this I mean I think this looks incredible for for such a simple preparation on this roast and the chassil charred should be charred it's not this color it's not right you want to give it a little sort of run around that that glaze and that that lovely sauce that is caramelized perfectly over that slow cooking process and you'll see then you get this glaze all the way round and my chassil in a couple in a few minutes time you can slice into that nice and easy of course in the restaurants they have the hanging and you actually just have this meat room temperature crackling for the perfect slow cook roast but then finished off at the end and you can hear how almost hollow that is when you flick at it or the classic instagram scrape but the the idea is that when I then cut into this once it's rested a little you'll get your lovely pieces of meat and fat juice that will just sort of run out of it slow cook roasting methods with one piece of meat I've enjoyed this learning process with me then give us a like comment let us know what else you want to learn or you want me to experiment with because that is the whole point of cooking full stop in my mind play with your food tried new things test things out see why and what these different cooking techniques do