I have planned to make some char siu for a long time, so when I returned to England I set about finding a recipe. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any agreed upon recipe for char siu, so I found four different recipes on the internet and set out to find which one is the best!
The 4 recipes are from these 4 web sites
1. http://www.gastronomydomine.com/?p=269
2. http://www.foodieforums.com/vbulletin/archive/index.php?t-4263.html
3. http://momofukufor2.com/2010/03/chinese-barbecue-porkchar-siu-recipe/
and 4. http://www.discusscooking.com/forums/f17/char-siu-recipe-60077.html
Stage 1 : - The Ingredients
There is some overlap between the four recipes, but there are significant differences as well. The combined shopping that I needed to do for this experiment was as follows...
1 kg shoulder of pork
Light soy sauce
Dark soy sauce
Runny honey
Sugar
Chinese 5 spice powder
Chinese rice wine
Hoisin Sauce
Sesame oil
Bean paste (preserved bean curd)
Garlic
Ginger
and Pepper
These ingredients look something like this...
Stage 2 : - The Marinade
The first step in making char siu is to marinade the pork. I cut up the pork into 8 pieces, around one inch, by two inches by five inches and seperated it in to 4 portions of 2 pieces each. Then I prepared the marinades to the following recipes.
Recipe 1
Mix 5 tablespoons light soya sauce, 3 tablespoons dark soya sauce, 5 tablespoons runny honey, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon five spice powder, ½ glass Chinese rice wine, 3 tablespoons Hoisin sauce, 1 thumb-sized piece of crushed ginger and 4 fat cloves of crushed garlic.
Recipe 2
Mix 3 tablespoons soy sauce, 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce, 2 tablespoons rice wine, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3 cloves crushed garlic and 2 tablespoons of sugar.
Recipe 3
Mix 3 tablespoons sugar, 3 tablespoons honey, 3 tablespoons hoisin sauce, 3 tablespoons sweet soy sauce, 1 teaspoon Chinese five spice powder, 1 teaspoon white pepper, 2 tablespoons sesame oil and half a head of crushed garlic. Keep 1/4 of this mix aside for later.
Recipe 4
Mix 2 tablespoons water, 2 tablespoons dark soy sauce, 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce, 1 tablespoon bean paste, 1 tablespoon rice wine, 1 1/2 tablespoons honey, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 large clove crushed garlic.
To marinade the pork I took four freezer bags and put 2 pieces of pork into each, and then poured each of the marinades into the respective bags. This is what it looked like
I left these in the fridge overnight.
Stage 3 : - The Cooking
To complicate things even further, the four different recipes also have completely different ways of cooking the meat! The commonality between them is that they are all cooked in the oven directly on a rack, over a tray of water. Here are the instructions for the four recipes.
If you are using a fan assisted oven I recommend reducing all of the temperatures in these instructions by 20° C.
Recipe 1
Heat the oven to 210° C and place the meat, basted with some of its marinade, on a rack over a roasting tin with a couple of centimetres of water in it. Roast for 20 minutes, then baste again on both sides, turn the meat over and reduce the heat to 180° C. Roast for another ten minutes, then baste and turn again, and roast for a final ten minutes.
Transfer the meat to a plate, empty the tin of water and line it with foil. Place the meat and rack back on the tin, then brush it liberally with the glaze and put it under the grill for about five minutes, until the glaze is glossy and starting to catch at the edges. Turn the meat, glaze again and put back under the grill until the other side is also glossy and starting to caramelise.
Recipe 2
Pre-heat oven 180° C. Pour 1 cup water into roasting pan, place meat strips on wire rack and cook 30 minutes on one side, 30 on the other. Baste with drippings occasionally. If water in pan dries up, pour in more water and after 1 hour, brush meat with honey on both sides. Return meat to oven 5-8 minutes remove and let cool.
Recipe 3
Heat the oven to 180° C. Shake the excess sauce off the pork and roast the pieces on a rack over a roasting dish that you’ve lined with tin foil. The char siu should be cooked after about 45 minutes depending on the size of your meat. The internal temperature of the pork should be 72° C. To char your char siu, brush the pork with the remaining reserved marinade you saved and turn the oven up to 200° C. Turn the pieces to char on all sides. Keep a close eye on your pork, this won’t take long.
Recipe 4
Put a baking pan of water on the lowest rack setting. Set another rack in the middle or upper third of the oven. Set the oven to 180° C. Lay the meat directly on middle rack over the water pan. The pan of water catches drips that otherwise burn and smoke terribly in the oven. Bake 45 minutes in the oven with a bump up to 200° C for the last few minutes to set the glaze.
The finished products of this cooking process looked like this...
Stage 4 : - The Tasting
Myself and my brother had the pleasure of doing the tasting of the four pork recipes.
The results are as follows
Recipe Trev Stephen
1 1 1
2 3 2
3 4 4
4 2 3
We both agreed that the first recipe was the best. I think that it might be significant that this one had the most marinade, specifically rice wine.
Recipes 2 and 3 seemed to be a little bland. There wasn't much marinade for either of these. I preferred recipe 4 over 2 and 3, my brother liked it less. The 4th recipe was very garlicky, which I like, but my brother is less keen.
So, in conclusion, do recipe 4 from the web-site http://www.gastronomydomine.com/?p=269
