When I was about 11 years ago, I invited my best friend Dina to my grandma’s house for lunch. She tasted one of my grandma’s special dish — fried crispy meat, and then kept shouting:” So good! If your grandma opened a food stand around our school, that would be really crowed!”. At that moment I realized how lucky I am to have delicious crispy meat once in a while.
Fried crispy meat is usually served during Spring Festival, and is believed (by me and some other Sichuan residents) to be a Sichuan tradition. A lot of my Chinese friends even never heard about it until I told them. Once I cooked it for some of my friends in Columbia, Missouri at a potluck party , they found it amazingly good. I am so proud. I sent the photo of my dish to my mum and grandma, they are so glad that this little girl who used to know nothing about cooking grows into a housewife-standard cook. Yeah, life is unpredictable.
I fried this dish in January 2012, when some friends gathered to enjoy a big potluck party to celebrate the Spring Festival. It’s my first time but it turned out fortunately great: it’s tender inside and crispy outside, and saturated with great flavor.
For this dish, you will also need the pork belly, mostly like the stewed pork with brown sauce I talked about last week, but maybe the part with a little bit less fat. Pork belly has a very cute name in China: three-line meat, because the fat and lean are interlaced so you will see a line of white (fat), a line of red (lean) and a line of white, or vise versa. A mixture of fat and lean will leads to high-class taste of the crispy meat, so stick to pork belly. If you don’t like fat, I am afraid you’ll have to compromise. Ok, let’s get started.
Step-by-Step:
1. Prepare: pork belly, eggs (4-6), starch, flour (some people don’t include that, but my grandma always do and I think it tastes better this way), prickly ash, salt, cooking wine.
2. Chop the pork into slices, slimmer and smaller than the stewed pork (probably half the size or even smaller). Just imagine you will wrap the pork with eggs and flour, so don’t make the slices too big.
3. Then you need to add some cooking wine, salt and prickly ash into the chopped pork, and mix them thoroughly. Let stand for 20 minutes.
4. Stir the eggs and pour them into the pork, add some starch and flour. Add starch and flour gradually to make sure the humidity is under control. You need to make sure it’s kind of sticky but also easy to separate.
5. Pour some oil in the pot. (You need a fair amount of oil for this! The oil should be able to cover all, at least most of the meat you have. You can reuse the oil to cook other dishes when you are done.) ; Heat the oil until there is little bubble in it, and throw the slices in the pot one by one and fry the pork with medium temp for about 5 minutes or until it turns light yellow. Take the meat out of the pot if you think the color is a little yellow and it’s mostly done.
6. Then you heat the oil again to higher temperature, and throw the meat in the oil and fry again with high temp just for a little while. This is to make the outside crispy! You need to stop the heating and take out the meat immediately when the color went darker, or it will be over fried. Then you are all finished.
YouTube Video Tutorial:
Here is a video I found on YouTube that introduced how to cook this dish. It’s a well known food channel in China and the young lady is a Sichuan local and has been cooking food since she was only five. What she did is not completely the same with my method, but you can get a sense of the basics. She only used starch but not flour, which I don’t really agree. She added green onion but I don’t think that’s necessary. She only fried it once but I firmly believe two-time fry would work out better in the taste! It’s up to you and you can try it out and see which option works best.
It doesn’t have English caption but I think you will understand it if you already read through my step-by-step introduction. It’s more than seven minutes long but you only need to watch the first five and a half.
In this video, the young lady offered one little trick to make the dish better: when you salt the meat with salt and prickly ash, you can cover it with plastic wrap and put the meat in the refrigerator. I’ve heard people talking that this might work better in salting the meat. It may work. Go ahead and try it!
Next week, I will go back to SPICY dishes and introduce more types of spicy flavors in Sichuan food. ARE YOU READY?
Sichuan Dishes, and More. 