Pork-a-riffic!

Looks like I'm doomed to be a day behind this week unless I accidentally end up eating takeaway one night. Oh well. 

On Sunday I decided to do something a little bit experimental - a recipe that I'd usually find a bit daunting although it was surprisingly simple. (Incidentally, I loved this recent article on culinary deal breakers - the sort of thing that makes you file a recipe under 'It's not you, it's me' and beat a hasty retreat:  www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/dining/04recipes.html?_r=1&ref=dining&oref=slogin )

The dish in question was Tung po pork from The Taste of China by Ken Hom, via Stephanie Alexander. She quotes a section from Chinese Gastronomy by Hsiang Ju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin on this dish: "tungpo pork is customarily served at the end of a meal... People sigh, shout and groan with happiness when they see it." There was certainly a little happy groaning round my place last night (obviously in a strictly culinary sense). In the recipe a piece of pork belly is cooked in three different ways; initially it's blanched in boiling water, then it's placed on the skin side in a hot pan to brown and then it's cooked slowly in a broth of ginger, spring onions, sugar, dark and light soy, rice wine and water. The last constituted my first slow-cooker outing of the winter. A very interesting recipe; I learnt why it's called crackling for a start! The pan-frying was accompanied by spitting fat and a sound like fire-crackers going off - I was very grateful for the splatter mat that J. and T. gave me last Christmas! The end result was pork which - if not quite at the ideal custard-like consistency - was still falling apart to the touch in a sweet, salty sauce that demanded to be soaked up with lots of rice. There were three textures in the meat: the browned skin, the softer fat and the tender meat and this combined with the different notes in the sauce added up to a dish that was quite subtle and varied. It was also good on a sandwich at lunch today - does that count as fusion cuisine?