Thai pork toasts

Kanom Punk Na Moo, or pork toasts, are right up there with my favourite unhealthy Thai starters. If you’re not familiar with them, imagine a Chinese sesame prawn toast without the sesame and the prawns, but with a moist and fragrant layer of pork instead. The little toasts are deep-fried, which makes the bread crisp and seals the rich, savoury coating’s flavour in. Some recipes use prawn in the mixture with the pork, but this is as authentic, less expensive and really, really delicious. This is unusual in being a Thai recipe whose ingredients are pretty easy to get hold of in the UK.

It’s important that you use boring old supermarket white, sliced bread in this recipe. Your home-made, stone-ground wheat loaf may be delicious toasted for breakfast, but it just won’t work in this recipe; you need plain old white bread here. (There are a few things for which nothing but sliced white will do, including the fried bread which accompanies your cooked breakfast.)

To serve six you’ll need:

750g minced pork
6 tablespoons mushroom soya sauce (available at oriental grocers’ shops)
1 heaped tablespoon cornflour
2 handfuls minced coriander
4 chopped spring onions
6 large cloves garlic, crushed
1 egg
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
8 slices white bread
Oil for deep frying

Remove the crusts from the bread and cut each slice into quarters.

Mix the pork, soya sauce, cornflour, coriander, spring onions, garlic, egg and pepper in a large bowl, using your hands, until everything is well blended. Use a spatula to press a tablespoon or so of mixture into each little piece of bread, cutting more bread if you need it.

Heat fresh oil to 190°C, and fry the little toasts in batches for six minutes each. That’s it; you’re done. Serve with Thai sweet chilli sauce and Ar Jard sauce.

Roast belly pork with fennel seeds

See this post for methods to get your pork crackling crisp and puffy.

I bought this belly pork from Sainsbury’s to see how successfully it would roast; I’m looking for belly pork to make Siu Yuk, a Chinese crispy belly pork with, and am roasting it in a European style until I find a successful joint which is fatty enough. This joint wasn’t fatty enough, but it made a rich and delicious supper roasted Italian-style with lemon, fennel and onions.

Update – about a year later, I did manage to track down some pork which was just right for Chinese crispy belly pork. You can see that recipe here.

The joint was really quite disturbingly lean and upsettingly tiny (this is what I get for supermarket shopping late at night in the middle of the week), but at least it was nice and dry. It’s not always easy to find belly pork on the bone in the first place; when roasted this only yielded about two tablespoons of fat. Amazing; this is where a pig stores its body fat, and I would expect to see nice, thick lines of white fat separating the layers of lean meat, with a soft layer beneath the skin to aid crackling. This pig had been working out (or had been bred for lean meat, but there’s a whole post on exactly what I think of modern farming methods waiting to be written one day when I’m in a bad mood). I had some lard in the fridge from a pork joint I cooked a while ago, and used that to annoint my anorexic pig-tum.

I’ve noticed fennel being used with pork in a lot of restaurants recently, and it’s a very good accompaniment. With lemon and onion it makes for a rich base of flavour. To serve two, you’ll need:

800g belly pork on the bone
1 onion, sliced thinly
1 lemon, sliced thinly
4 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
1 tablespoon lard
Salt and pepper

Prepare the pork skin for crackling, being very sure on this small joint to keep your scoring close. Rub the surface with salt, pepper and half of the fennel, and place the whole joint in a roasting tin on top of the sliced onion and lemon (skin still on), sprinkled with the rest of the fennel, and the whole cloves of garlic. Roast at 220°C for half an hour, then bring the temperature down to 150°C for twenty minutes. Rub the skin with the lard, and finish the joint under a hot grill for around five minutes, watching it carefully to stop the crackling from catching.

I served this with mashed potato and sweet red and yellow, pointed peppers which I grilled in a griddle-pan on the top of the oven, mixing the juice from the peppers with the pork’s pan juices to make a kind of gravy. Rich and delicious.

Roast pork with crackling

Cripes. Make that “Roast pork with award-winning crackling”. A few years after I wrote the post below, the recipe ended up being tested on the Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog, where it beat the competition hollow. This would be unremarkable it that competition hadn’t been Hugh F-W, Delia, Prue Leith, Good Housekeeping and Simon Hopkinson. Get to it with that hairdryer.

These days, it can be hard to find meat that hasn’t been treated in processing with water and glucose to make it moister and heavier. Even when your joint of pork is free from these additives, it can be difficult to treat it in a way that results in roast pork with a popcorn-crisp, crackling skin. When you do manage it, puffed, salty crackling is a delectable thing of wonder. The technique has a lot to do with using varied cooking temperatures, and absolutely everything to do with making sure the skin is prepared properly before it even gets anywhere near the oven.

Modern joints are harder to raise a crackling skin from than the joints I remember from when I was a little girl. This has a lot to do with consumer demand for extra-lean, muscly meat, which just doesn’t have enough fat to make the magic happen. Look for a joint with plenty of fat under the skin. This is a 2kg rolled loin: enough to serve six people with plenty for sandwiches later. Although convenient, rolled joints are also hard to make crackle, especially where the skin meets the roasting tin. Don’t despair, though; you can still make it work with a bit of preparation.

The day before you eat, the skin of your pork must be dried thoroughly with paper kitchen towels, and scored well. Even if your butcher has already scored it, you will probably benefit from making sure the scoring is fine and regular, so you will want to add your own cuts to the skin. Use a craft knife on the cold skin of the meat (this is easiest when the skin and fat are cold and firm), scoring it in lines about half a centimetre apart. When the joint cooks, the fat will melt and bubble through those lines, crisping the skin it touches. Rub salt into the skin, as if the pork were somebody you are particularly fond of who is demanding a lovely exfoliating massage.

Now prepare to look slightly unbalanced in front of any visitors, and take a hairdryer to the skin of the meat until it’s absolutely bone dry. Wrap your joint in a teatowel and refrigerate it overnight. (The atmosphere in your fridge is extremely dry, and this will help any more moisture to evaporate.)

On the day you cook it, rub some more salt into the skin, making sure it gets through the cracks where you scored it and into the fat. Put a bed of onions at the bottom of a metal roasting dish and rest the pork on top of it. Heat up a large knob of good pork dripping or goose fat (use goose fat in preference to one of those white blocks of lard) over a high flame in a small saucepan and pour the searing hot fat over the skin, then put the roasting tin in the oven at a very hot 220°C. After quarter of an hour, lower the heat to 180°C and cook the joint for two hours, basting every 20 minutes. Finally, turn the heat back up again for a final quarter of an hour – this should cause your minutely prepared skin to puff up and crackle deliciously. (Keep an eye on it and leave it in for a few minutes longer if necessary.)

Every family has its own gravy method, just like Tolstoy said. (Mr Weasel tells me that this is not what Tolstoy said at all. Pshaw. It’s what he should have said.) While you rest the joint for ten minutes in a warm place, make gravy to your family recipe. Remove the carapace of crackling, carve the meat and divide the splintering crackling between the plates. Serve with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, green vegetables and apple sauce. Hooray for the old days.

Sausage rolls

My Grandma’s second husband (yes, the Grandma with the salad cream) was a butcher in a town where they liked their meat cheap and homogenous. He had a sausage machine. In one end, he’d put pieces of elderly grey stuff which looked like precisely what they were – anatomy. He’d add a dehydrated, pre-bought rusk mix that he’d wetted overnight with some tepid tap water. He’d drop in a pellet of pink food colouring and a wodge of aging fat that he’d scraped off some of the meat he’d sold to the partially-sighted lady who thought she was buying topside. Sausages came out the other end, excreted by the burping machine into glistening, protein-condom skins.

The thing I still, all these years later, completely fail to understand, is why people used to queue up to buy these gristly objects, full of bone-nubbins and unidentifiable chewy things. Why they still snatch their supermarket equivalents off the shelves with dead-eyed apathy. It took me years to trust sausages and sausage meat again, and I still read sausage packets more closely than I’ve ever read an employment contract. Be careful with your sausage meat. When you make this recipe, buy whole sausages you trust and whose packets list ingredients like meat and herbs (rather than trays of sausage meat full of nitrates and soy), slit their skins, and squeeze the meat out.

These sausage rolls are loosely based around Delia Smith’s sausage rolls, with tweaks to the filling and one very important difference; the pastry is not hers, but my great grandmother’s. Nana was a proper cook in the Edwardian tradition who believed that fat was extremely good for you. I agree with her (nothing is better for your mental health than bacon), which is why these sausage rolls contain nearly twice the butter that Delia’s very good rolls do.

This pastry is a traditional flaky pastry which doesn’t require the samurai-sword folding that many more modern recipes require. It also has more butter in it than it does flour; surprisingly, it’s very easy to handle. If you can’t eat without guilt at Christmas, when can you? Try these; they’re excellent and dreadfully English.

You’ll need:

Pastry
10 oz salted butter
6 oz plain flour
Water – amount depends on heat and humidity of kitchen
1 egg yolk

Filling
1 lb sausage meat (squeeze it out of trustworthy – probably quite expensive – sausages)
1 heaped tablespoon dried sage (preferable to fresh in this recipe)
1 egg
1 onion, chopped very finely
Lots of pepper
A grating of nutmeg
A pinch of salt

It’s important that you work your pastry as cold as you can to make it crisp and short. Begin by chilling the butter until it’s completely solid – I freeze it a la Delia for an hour before beginning. Put the mixing bowl in the fridge for the hour as well. (Nana used to put the mixing bowl in a sink with the plug out, running the cold tap around the outside of the bowl as she worked. I don’t go quite this far – my fridge is cold enough.) Use the coarse side of your grater to grate all of the butter into tiny curls – the idea here is to keep the pastry as cool as you can all the time, and to avoid handling it with blood-hot hands wherever possible. With a knife blade (Nana had a knife she used specifically for pastry), blend it into the flour, working as fast as you can. When everything is mixed well, add icy-cold water, tablespoon by tablespoon, until the pastry has collected together in a clean dough which doesn’t stick to the sides of the bowl. Use your hands to make it into a ball, working the pastry as little as possible. The finished pastry doesn’t need to look smooth throughout; aim for a texture like that in the picture.

Nana’s cooking genes were good ones where pastry was concerned. While I’m useless with bread, dumpling and other doughs, I excel at pastry; it’s always short, light and melting. I think it’s the cold hands and the disregard for my arteries.

Refrigerate the pastry for an hour, wrapped tightly in cling film.

While you refrigerate the dough, mix the filling ingredients with your hands. Leave in a bowl for the flavours to mingle while the pastry is resting.

When your pastry is ready, divide it into three and roll each third out on a floured board (if you have a glass board, you’ll find these stay nice and cold and also remain non-sticky for longer than they would on wood) into a rectangle whose long side is around 50 cm.

Roll it out as thin as you possibly can, then divide the filling into three and make a line with a third of the filling down the middle of the pastry rectangle. Trim the surrounding pastry (there will be some wastage) so that you can fold one thickness of pastry around the roll of sausage meat, dampen one edge with some water and roll it up. Use a knife to chop the long roll of pastry and sausage into ten pieces.

Use scissors (thank you Delia) to snip two little arrow shapes in the top of each piece, and glaze each one with egg yolk. Bake on a non-stick sheet for 25 minutes at 220 c. Remove with tongs and eat piping hot and crisp, thinking happy Santa thoughts.

I am in a state of terror about what we’re going to eat on Boxing day. We seem to be getting through the freezer’s stash of nibblable things very fast. The good news is that these sausage rolls freeze at the pre-glazing stage perfectly, and I’ve another thirty or so in a Tupperware box, freezing away happily. Defrost to cook and give up thanks that the great god Miele thought to invent the freezer.

Peking dumplings

It’s nearly Christmas. The family is descending upon the Uptonarium, and this calls for finger foods which I can freeze and cook quickly, with the minimum of fuss. Not for me, though, the supermarket mini-samosa or the tiny quiche in a box. I’m making Peking dumplings; lovely little pockets exploding with Chinese flavours, which are fried golden and crisp on one side, and steamed soft and tender on the other. In the north of China, these are traditionally eaten on New Year’s Day. Here in the south of England, we’re going to be eating them on Christmas Eve; infinitely nicer than the traditional glass of sherry and a carrot.

These dumplings freeze, uncooked, brilliantly, and, being tiny, defrost very quickly for cooking. If you’re freezing them, you can do the final, cooking step once your dumplings have defrosted. Try them as an alternative to sausage rolls.

For sixty Peking dumplings (I am informed that Americans call these ‘pot-stickers’), you’ll need:

Wonton wrappers
You can either buy sixty wonton wrappers in the Chinese supermarket, or make your own, as I did, using:
1lb very strong white bread flour
1 1/2 cups water

Filling
1lb minced pork
1/4 white cabbage, chopped finely
15 spring onions, chopped finely
1 small tin water chestnuts, chopped finely
1 bulb garlic (about ten cloves), chopped finely
2 in piece of ginger, peeled and chopped finely
1 teaspoon caster sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon msg (leave out if you really must)
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons Chinese rice wine (substitute cooking sherry if you can’t find any)
1 tablespoon sesame oil

Start by mixing the bread flour and water into a soft, but not sticky, dough, adding more flour or water if your dough is sticky or dry. The resulting dough should be as soft as the plump bit at the heel of your thumb. Set aside in a covered bowl for the gluten to develop.

Chop all the filling ingredients to the same size. You should end up with around the same amount of vegetables as you have pork. Using your hands (I hope you took your rings off to mix the dough, or your diamonds are going to be set in a lovely crusty dumpling mixture), squish the whole lot together until it’s well mixed and holding together loosely. Don’t worry about adding eggs or anything else to bind; the wrappers will keep everything together for you.



Set the filling mixture to one side for the flavours to mingle while you prepare the wonton skins.

There’s a reason you used strong bread flour; the gluten in it will give you a very smooth, tough dough, which stretches easily and doesn’t break and snap. Looking at your ball of dough, I realise it is hard to imagine that you’ll get sixty bits out of it large enough to make into wrappers. Trust me; you will. It’s stretchy stuff. Start by dividing it into two, then divide each of those bits into three. The remaining small pieces are easy to chop into ten equal-sized bits.

Roll each piece into a rough circle on a floury board. You don’t need to be terribly accurate with these; the tops will be frilly anyway, so don’t worry if, like me, you suddenly start acting like someone with fewer than the full complement of fingers when faced with dough and a rolling pin. When you’ve rolled your little wrapper, put it on a plate; you can stack the others on top of it and they won’t stick together.

When all your wrappers are made, put one on the board and place a teaspoon of the mixture (this is quite easy to judge if you make the spoonful about the size of the ball of dough that went to make up one wrapper) in the middle of it. Moisten a semicircle around the edge of the dough (don’t moisten all the way round or it won’t stick), and push the two halves of the circle together, crimping the edges as you go.

I am full of admiration for dim sum chefs, with their lightness of finger and artistry when faced with wrappers. Some of them even make them look like fish or little bunny rabbits. My own are always functional, and never pretty. Anyway; crimp away, and if you’re even half good at this, you’ll end up with something that looks prettier than this picture.

At this point, you can freeze the little dumplings. Line a container with floured greaseproof paper, put a layer of dumplings in, cover with more floured greaseproof paper, add another layer and so on until the container is full. Defrost before continuing to the next stage.

To cook, heat some vegetable oil in a thick-bottomed, non-stick (there is a reason the Americans call these things pot-stickers) frying pan, and when it is hot, slide the dumplings in carefully in one layer, their bottoms in the sizzling fat and their frilly tops pointing upwards. After about five minutes, pour water into the pan until it reaches halfway up the sides of the dumplings. Simmer over a medium heat without a cover until all the water has evaporated. The tops will be delicately steamed and the bottoms brown and crisp. Remove with a slotted skimmer.

These dumplings are traditionally served with black vinegar. (Chinese black vinegar, not the stuff you heathens put on chips.) I enjoy them with a good, sweet, bottled chili sauce mixed with a little soya sauce, alongside a nice cold beer.

Babi chin – Braised pork with soy beans

Tonight, I feel like something Malaysian. Wandering around Tesco, I realise it’s my lucky day; one of my favourite cuts of meat in Chinese and Malaysian terms is pork belly, which is full of flavour (and full of fat – but where do you think that flavour comes from?), and which becomes sticky and rich when braised for a long time. (It also makes a wonderful, crackling roast, which I hope to explore in a later post.) Pork belly is not a remotely popular thing in the UK, and, absurdly, this very tasty cut is only £1.50 for 160 grams. I look around at the grim women pushing joyless trolleys full of chicken nuggets and frozen pizzas, and think unrepeatably uppity thoughts. There is nothing like a Friday evening spent simmering things that smell nice, and feeling smug.

This dish uses cinnamon, which you may think of as a dessert spice. Try it with the meat in this recipe; you’ll add it at the beginning, in a paste with the onions and garlic, where it becomes beautifully aromatic. You’ll also need some black bean and garlic sauce, which is available in Chinese supermarkets, and a good five-spice powder.

Proper five-spice powder contains Szechuan peppercorns (not really a pepper, but a dried berry), star anise, cloves, fennel and more cinnamon. A good source in Cambridge is Daily Bread, a wholefood warehouse where they grind their own spices. They sell spices in containers of different sizes; little plastic bags, jam jars and enormous great sacks. (It’s a pretty inexpensive way to buy spices; if you’re in the area, give them a try. They are Christians of a slightly maniacal bent, but hey; the spices are good.)

Babi chin is another dark and rich recipe, and good for warming you from within. You’ll need the following:

1 medium onion
5 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon dark soya sauce
1 glass Shaoxing rice wine
3 tablespoons (half a jar) garlic black bean sauce (see photo)
2 teaspoons five spice powder
1 lb pork belly (with skin), sliced into bite-sized cubes
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, sliced into coins
6 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked
5 spring onions, whole
Water (to cover)
1 tablespoon groundnut oil

Chop the onion and garlic as fine as possible in a blender with the cinnamon. Heat the oil and fry the onion, garlic and cinnamon mixture until golden. Add the black bean sauce, the soya sauce, the five spice powder and sugar, and stir fry for two more minutes.

Add the pork and ginger, with a glass of rice wine and enough water to barely cover it with the sauce ingredients. Stir well to mix and increase the heat under the wok to high. Boil the sauce briskly until it is thick and reduced (about fifteen minutes). Add more water (about a pint) and bring to a simmer.

Add the soaked mushrooms and the spring onions. Lower the heat under the wok, cover it and simmer, stirring occasionally until the pork is meltingly tender (aim to be able to cut it without a knife). If you feel the sauce is too thick, add a little more water. Serve with rice.

This is beautiful, glossy, and syrupy. If I were in Malaysia, I’d have put some sugar cane in there with the pork. Sadly, I’m in Cambridgeshire. Sugar cane is not really considered a commodity over here. I need a holiday somewhere where interesting things grow.