The Best Sous Vide Chinese BBQ Pork Ever (Char Siu)

Now this is the best barbecue pork you will ever eat. The more traditional way of making it is using fermented tofu. The red color, that's what gives the char siu the red color traditionally. So we're not using food coloring? No we're not. Whatever you do, do not just like eat it like a chunk of tofu because this stuff is salty. If you eat the whole thing, I'm warning you, you would like regret it and maybe die. Do you want to try a piece of tofu? This is just a tinsy little bit. It's so salty. Okay two pieces of this fermented bean curd. That's only one piece. I know I'm telling people it's two pieces okay. So two pieces of these guys. I'm shouting one. One tablespoon dark soy sauce. This is mainly for coloring. One tablespoon of regular soy sauce. One tablespoon of oyster sauce. One teaspoon of five spice powder. Quarter teaspoon of white pepper. One tablespoon of sugar. So this guy is called maltose and I don't know if you've ever had it before. When we were kids, what we usually do is we grab some chopsticks and you like kind of stick it in there and then you try to like, well I think I feel like this is gonna break the chopsticks. But I feel like this is kind of like Chinese maple syrup and then you eat it like this or you get like two salting crackers and put it in between and kind of like eat it like that. So it's like sweet and salty and this is like a treat for kids. You know how in Quebec they have the maple syrup and they put it on the ice and then you kind of like roll up and eat it. Kind of the same deal. You can replace this with honey but just keep in mind that honey is much more sweeter. If you use some water and then get the maltose, I think it comes off easier but let's see how it goes. Don't bend our good spoons. This is not gonna mix in. Maybe we should microwave it. You're just like enjoying your freaking maltose while I'm like working hard here. This is really good. So while he is mixing, I'll get two cloves of garlic and like give this a little smash. Good smash. Good smash. And then this would go in to the marinating bag later. Do we need a microwave a little bit? Yes. Okay. It looks good. It looks good. All right let's mix it. So the reason why you would want to use like maltose is because like it kind of gives the sauce the richness and you know how potatoes, like the really good ones, they would have like a rich coating of sauce on top. Kind of like a honey consistency. So maltose kind of gives you that consistency and have that sauce stuck on top of the meat. So usually for char siu, we would use a pork butt. We have already cut this. It's about a pound. Pork butt, why we usually choose that is because it has a good amount of fat and a good amount of lean meat. When I usually go buy char siu, I will ask for half fat, half lean. That's the type of char siu I like. Ziploc bag, check. Good freezer one. We're putting this into the bag. Okay, chuck the two pieces of garlic in there. Two pieces of garlic going in. Okay and chuck the sauce in. Make sure all of the meat is coated but you can also save some for later when we actually finish it off with the broiler. So we can baste it. Well, we're going to sous vide it first. We are sous vide-ing because we want the perfect texture and temperature for our barbecue pork. Yes. So we're going to massage it a little bit. Make sure we have enough sauce. Okay, so this baby goes into the fridge for 24 hours. All right, let's do it. We're going to get our trusty food saver. We're going to put them in the food saver bags. We're going to drop this into our sous vide at 140 for eight hours. After you take it out of the water bath, you're going to want to cool it quickly so bacteria doesn't get a chance to form. From here, you can put it straight into the fridge or freezer and make it some other time. I'm going to make it right now so we're going to go from there. But once it's cooled, we take it out. We are going to start making our barbecue pork. We're going to put our oven to broil based with some of the leftover liquid. You're going to want to put a little bit of water in the tray and this will just make sure that if any dripping, they don't burn under the broiler. We'll put in for 15 minutes, applying a new layer of glaze every five minutes. This will help to develop a nice thick crust. This is the finishing glaze. One tablespoon of maltose, one tablespoon of honey, one tablespoon of water. Microwave until mixable. You can also use a blow torch until it's nice and charred. Which piece? I'll get it. Half fat, half skinny. All right, here we go. This is really good. I know, I was not expecting the most tender char siu I've ever eaten in my life. I think one thing I would do would be increase the sweetness a little bit more. That's what I was thinking. Let's brush another layer of that. That's the finishing glaze. Brush brush another layer, then we're good. It's supposed to be like mat sap, right? Mat sap is like kind of like you see in those barbecue stores, like it's always like dripping. That's a layer of honey or like maltose. It's supposed to be like a thick layer like that. They're really good. That's all I know how to say now. And the cool thing is that, you know, when you do a siu vee, the whole thing is already cooked. Usually like if you cook in an oven, sometimes the char is like in one area and then the thick part is not charred at all. But here you can kind of control how much you char it because you can like use the torch, the blow torch. It's so tender. I'm talking, OK? Another slice? Yes. And then the good thing is that with the siu vee, you can marinate the meat, chuck in the freezer, and then I can have char siu anytime you want. And well, I mean, this whole thing is gone. We'll have two more slices. If you want to see any more recipes, comment below. Let us know what you want us to experiment on or try. And, you know, subscribe if you like us and happy char siu eating. And if you haven't watched God of Cookery, you must watch God of Cookery. It is the best movie ever. Yep. I think the next thing we should do is the beef bowl. And then you can dress up like that guy. OK.