Chik's Crib

01 June 2020

Chinese Roasted Pork Belly Recipe, Version 3

Recipe June 01, 2020 0

Version 3.0

Way back in 2017, when my housemates and I bought 5 kilos of pork belly and started roasting pork bellies, this has been been a recipe that I revisit every so often. It didn't always turn out successful, but after several years of revising the original recipe that was given to me, I think I'm near done with tweaking the recipe!

One of the good changes I'd experienced? A change in mindset. The 2017 snob who declared that it was essential to have an oven capable of reaching rip-roaring, flames-from-the-depths-of-hell has been proven wrong. My current oven is a cheap standalone one which, at 2 years of age, isn't capable of reaching above 200C anymore:(. Yes, I checked with an oven thermometer. But no matter. With this revised way of making pork belly, the skin has been crispier than it has ever been.

Pic by Rainer, circa 2017

Of course, those of us with a good oven should find it easier. We once accidentally ended up with perfect crunchy, blistered skin on our pork shoulders in Tasmania even without drying out the skin beforehand, just by virtue of the great oven at the Airbnb. So crunchy, I half-expected the neighbours to peer into our windows to see what we were up to. (Well also, our enthusiastic roasting triggered the fire alarm a couple of times - we should have opened the windows!)

For those interested in the technical points on how it works:

A) Leaving the pork uncovered in the fridge overnight dries out the pork skin completely. When roasted in the oven, the skin becomes unbelievably crispy.

B) Submerging the meat portion of the pork in broth during roasting keeps the meat soft and tender, preventing it from getting dried out during roasting even as the skin becomes blistered and crunchy.

And that's it! That's the main takeaway from this recipe. I admit I don't even measure the ingredients anymore, and neither should you. I just scatter the spices over the pork meat willy-nilly. Unlike baking, most savory dishes have a wide leeway and most recipes are a guide rather than a didactic set of instructions. If you don't feel comfortable eyeballing, you can use five spice powder: white pepper at 1:3 ratio. But honestly, you don't need to know that.

Now, go forth and treat yourself to some pork belly.

Just be sure to keep your windows open.

Chinese Roasted Pork Belly Recipe, Version 4

Many recipes online recommend pricking the pork belly skin, but I prefer to score it with a sharp knife and omit prickling. I find that it interferes with the crisping up of the skin, and I enjoy the visual of diamond-shaped pork skin with large golden blisters. To each their own.

INGREDIENTS
1 kg Pork belly
Five Spice Powder / White Pepper / Salt (ratio of 1 tbsp: 1 tsp:1 tsp)

Salt (Additional salt for the skin)

STEPS
1. Rub the sides and bottom generously with five spice powder, and sparingly with white pepper. Be careful not to get any on the skin.

2. Use a paper towel to pat the skin dry, and rub away any five-spice powder.

3. Rub in 3-4 teaspoons of salt over the pork belly skin.

4. Rest the pork uncovered and skin-side up in the fridge overnight.

When ready to cook the pork belly,
5. Preheat oven to 180C. Place the pork belly skin-side-up in a roasting tray set on the middle rack of your oven. Carefully pour water into the roasting tray, taking care not to splash any liquid onto the skin, until the liquid level reaches the fat layer just below to the pork skin. Roast for 1 - 1.5 hours, until a fork goes in through the meat easily from the side and diagonally down (taking care not to attempt to pierce through the skin).

6. When the meat is tender, turn the oven to 'low broil'. Keep the pork belly on the middle rack, letting the skin blister and turn crunchy. This may take anywhere from 5-15 minutes. Tapping on the skin with a metal utensil should create a deep, solid sound. (For those with a stovetop oven, like me, you can achieve the same effect by turning off the bottom heating coil while leaving the top heating coil on. Turn the temperature down to 160C, and continue roasting for 4-5 mins, until the skin is crunchy.)

7. Slice and serve.

Variations

This is less of a recipe, and more of a guide to make crispy pork belly. You can use any spice that you fancy; and even premixed spices are good. We particularly like using a incidentally-bought spice mix from Kotanyi picked up by my parents when they were travelling in Poland: the przyprawa do zeberek z miodem.

Last edit on 28/02/24: edited to include instructions for traditional oven compared to stovetop ovens.

25 May 2020

James Beard's Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic

Recipe May 25, 2020 0

Coming off a particularly challenging work month and dusting off my kitchen mittens, I thought I should return to cooking with an easy-to-make recipe from an old master. This is a Provençal recipe, and made with hearty ingredients that are both cheap and plentiful. James Beard encountered this dish when he was stationed in the region during World War II. Eighty years later, with the world wrangling with yet another global crisis with an economic downturn, it's a good time to start using wallet-friendly ingredients in my cooking.

This dish has absolutely none of the pungent garlicky smell that you'd find from raw garlic.
As this video showcasing the ever-delightful Jacques Pépin explains (skip to 4:26), there are 2 kinds of essential oil found in garlic. When garlic is smashed or cut, they are exposed to each other, producing the familiar pungent smell of garlic. When garlics are instead kept whole and gently slow-roasted, you end up with this smooth mellow sauce that is both sweet and rich. It only has the barest hint of garlic, and you can scarf it down the entire platter without smelling like you'd just vampire-proofed the entire household.

James Beard's Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic
Adapted from James Beard Foundation
This recipe is easy to make and serve, and minimum prep work is required. Searing the chicken takes 5 minutes on each side, giving you plenty of time to peel the amount of garlic.

INGREDIENTS
10 chicken pieces, in a combination of drumsticks and thighs
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
3 tablespoons olive oil
40 cloves of garlic, approximately 3 bulbs, peeled
2 tablespoons dry vermouth
1 tablespoon dried tarragon
1 cup low sodium chicken broth

STEPS
1. Season the chicken with salt, black pepper, and nutmeg.

2. Preheat oven to 180C.

3. In a large pot, heat olive oil over medium-high heat. Sear the chicken pieces on both sides until a golden crust forms, about 4 to 5 minutes on each side. Work in batches if you have to, taking care not to overcrowd the pot. Remove the chicken, and add in the garlic. Sauté garlic for 6 to 8 minutes, until golden brown.

4. Deglaze the pot with vermouth. Add chicken broth, tarragon, and return the chicken to the pot. Bring to a boil. Cover with the lid and and place the pot into the oven for about an hour, until the chicken is tender.

5. Serve immediately with hot toast. Softened garlic can be spread on bread.

26 February 2020

Stella Park's New York Cheesecake

Sweets February 26, 2020 0

Hello friends! It's a couple of months into the new year, and looking back at 2019, it's a year with much to be thankful for, and I could think of no better one to cap off the decade.

There's a lot to be grateful about, and at the very top of my list would be the wonderful folks in my life. These people make life fun. And the colleagues I've met, who made working more enjoyable than I thought possible. Also, I developed a new newfound obsession with Dungeons and Dragons, which is quite enjoyable indeed (although to everybody else who don't play - their eyes kind-of glaze over when I describe the game. But I won't hold their bad tastes against them...)

One of the biggest thing that sparked joy this year was my trip to California, where amongst all the sightseeing, my sister and I squeezed in perfect moments of dessert-making in the quiet mornings before her kids return from school. One outstanding recipe was this cheesecake, courtesy of Stella Park. To be honest, her article on cake pans won me over already, namely, how springform pans are substandard pieces of kitchen equipment. Restaurant cheesecakes are gorgeous pieces of work: tall, majestic and towering, while springform pans, with its shallow built, creates unimpressive squat-looking cheesecake slices. Plus, the deep grooves of springform pans make the extra cleaning a pain-in-the-you-know-where. I didn't think someone out there shares my sentiments until, well, I came across her article. She recommends a loose-bottom cake pan instead.

Her brownie recipe displaced my old favourite brownie recipe, and this is another winning recipe. I returned to this recipe again and again over the next few months. I've made it for Christmas (as the festive pictures show), and again for the New Year's, and increasingly, for no particular occasions other than satiating my cheesecake cravings. I usually find most Western-style cheesecakes too sweet and sit too heavily in the stomach. Coming across this recipe completely changed my perspective. It was a breath of fresh air. It's simply out-of-this-world, and I'll be hard-pressed to find a cheesecake that is better than this.

Stella Park's New York Cheesecake
Adapted from Serious Eats
Makes a 8-inch wide, 3-inch tall cheesecake
I'd made a few tweaks to the original recipe (mostly because I didn't have the cash to spring for a 4-inch tall cheesecake pan, and ended up with this budget beauty, which I'd come to love.) The original recipe's goat cheese profile was also a little hefty for me. Depending on the goat cheese available in your region, you may end up scaling up or down to personal preference.

Ingredients

250g graham biscuit

100g unsalted butter, melted

500g cream cheese, near room temperature
110g goat cheese
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tbsp vanilla
1/16 tsp salt
1/16 tsp orange blossom water (optional)
180g granulated sugar (or toasted sugar if you can swing it)
3 large eggs
95g heavy cream

Steps1.
If using a two-piece pan, wrap the bottom piece in foil. Lightly grease the bottom and the sides.

2.
Bash the graham biscuits into fine crumbs, and drizzle in the melted butter and salt. Mix until well combined. Using a silicone spatula or your hands, press the crumbs into a flat layer along the bottom of the pan.

3.
Preheat the oven to 230°C and set the oven rack to the middle.

4.
In a large bowl, beat cream cheese, goat cheese, lemon juice, vanilla extract, salt, and orange flower water (if using) on low until roughly combined, and then increase to medium and continue until the mixture is perfectly smooth (about 5 minutes.) Reduce speed to medium-low, add the sugar all at once. Mix only until well combined.

5.
Place a single-mesh strainer over the bowl, then add the eggs, whisking in the strainer until they pass through. Discard any clots of chalazae that remain in the sieve. Resume mixing on low until well combined.

6.
In a saucepan, bring the cream to a full boil. While mixing the cream cheese mixture at low speed, add the hot cream in a steady stream. This warms the batter, which helps release any air pockets introduced in mixing while reducing the overall bake time. Mix for a few seconds more and then stop.

7.
Pour the cheesecake batter into the cake pan. Gently rap the cake pan against a cloth set on a table to bring any air bubbles to the surface, and then pop the air bubbles with a spoon or butter knife.

8. Bake at 230°C until the edges of the cheesecake are puffed and dry to the touch, about 15-18 minutes, rotating the baking sheet midway to ensure even browning. Browning leads to a deeper, richer cheesecake. (For comparison's sake, the cheesecake in the pictures wasn't sufficiently browned.)

9.
Turn off the oven, crack open the door, and let it stand ajar 10 minutes. Then close the door and resume baking at 120°C for 30-40 minutes, until the outer edge of the cheesecake feels firm but the centre is still wobbly. (This wobbly zone should be no more than 3-inches wide.)

10.
Remove from the oven and let the cheesecake cool for 15 minutes, then run a thin knife around the sides to loosen the cheesecake from the sides (this helps the cake settle evenly as it cools). Continue letting it cool at room temperature for at least 1 hour before covering it to refrigerate until cold to the core, at least 12 hours.

Notes:
Excess cheesecake batter can be stored for up to one week. After Step 6, transfer the batter into an airtight container and refrigerating it. Bring cold batter to room temperature before baking.

29 November 2019

Of Summer - 3 weeks in California (Part 2)

USA November 29, 2019 0

Mulholland Drive is one of those places along Beverley Hill that's vastly popular. It's LA's most famous street, with a winding drive down the mountain with multiple lookout points overlooking LA's downtown. It's home to many Hollywood celebrities, and there's a running list online on where each celebrity stays. It's a little creepy that a subset of the tourism industry sprung up just for people to stalk celebrities. Do celebrities need privacy, and are they truly celebrities unless everybody knows their home address and/or blood type? It's on the way to Santa Monica, the coastal town with its ever-iconic beach and a Ferris wheel. It's just a few days after we visited Malibu, but we were in the tail-end of summer, and we wanted to make the most of what we could of LA's beaches. Another group that we saw on the beach along Santa Monica had the same idea; they were setting up a picnic complete with charcuterie, wine and all sorts of fruits.

After we built up an appetite, we went over to Santa Monica Seafood Market, Cafe and Oyster Bar, where I'd had a transcendental experience with their singular Seared Sesame Crusted Albacore. It was deeply rare in the middle, with a seared exterior and crusted with sesame seeds. It didn't taste like anything I'd had before, and even a few months later, it's the first thing I think of when I reminisce about the food I've had in LA.

Food plays a prominent role in my travels, and even the fast food was terrific. I couldn't get enough of Five Guys' Burgers' magnificent fries and burgers. It's no-frill, just a simple meal of burger-and-fries done perfectly well. Chick-fil-A also makes chicken burgers so tender, I could scarcely believe it was chicken breast.

I was on a mission to try every fast food I can, and Chipotle was one of the places I went to that brought a great cheer to my trip. The much-known American friendliness is well and alive in LA - where, get this - when the manager heard that I was a tourist having Chipotle for the first time, gifted me guacamole and a bag of tortilla chips. On the house. Sigh.

In-and-Out is just across the street from Camarillo Premium Outlets, where we had spent several enjoyable afternoons browsing and buying items that I hadn't quite realised I need in my life - until I tried them on. The days passed by rather splendidly.

My favourite pizza find was over at Parma Pizzeria Napoletana, where they serve regional pizza of every major style. I fell in love a little with their Detroit-style pizza, with their square-pan shapes of pizza with crisp cheesy edges. They were a delight.

We walked plenty around the neighbourhood. It wasn't still summer by the Gregorian calendar, but the Lunar Calendar runs on its own time and declared it the middle of autumn already. We spent a fine autumn evening in Deerhill Park, where the sun lit the surrounding mountains up in warm hues for the Mid-Autumn Festival. We drank plenty of tea, stuffed ourselves silly with mooncakes and watched the performance staged by Oak Park Chinese Association. And later, as dusk fell, we carried lanterns through the shadows.

************

Such a long holiday like this doesn't come by often, and for myself, traveling solo on a plane for 20+ hours isn't quite appealing. But, like my sister had observed, there's no better time in my life to drop everything and fly off somewhere else. Money can be earned again, but carefree memories of youth is priceless. I'd near spent all my money, and then whatever's left, I loaded up on Royce chocolate during the Tokyo stopover. We cooked and we ate our way through the weeks. We spent days lounging at home, playing all manners of board games with the kids. We ate too much, drank too much wine (Californian, naturally), shopped too much and generally over-indulged.

And there was no better way to spend the holidays.

24 November 2019

Of Summer - 3 weeks in California (Part 1)

USA November 24, 2019 0

I have been long-enthralled by California, first from my childhood spent reading the Sweet Valley series (time well-spent!), and later in life, from my (admittedly) odd obsession of the 1970s Californian food movement. So, when my sister in LA invited me to visit her for a bit, how could I say no?

When I finally arrived in LAX after the 20+ hours flight, clutching my bags of Royce Chocolate from Narita Airport, I was a little out of it from the jetlag. We took it easy for a bit, first dropping by Chinatown for roast ducks and chow mein for dinner, then a stroll around the nearby park as the sun set.

Most of my first couple of days was spent unpacking the goodies from my online shopping spree, such as the kilos of chocolate I bought from Chocosphere (the Californian chocolate-makers Scharffen Berger and Guittard), as well as my new baking supplies from Amazon. I'm not going to lie; that made me more excited than should have been humanly possible. I ripped right into the chocolates, opening them all and doing side-by-side comparisons. Even my five-year-old niece showed some hesitancy at opening every chocolate bar and bag at the same time, but I was a horrid influence.

In-between more chocolate blind-tasting tests, we made a day trip to The Original Farmer Market in LA, where I similarly couldn't resist Temecula Olive Oil Company's excellent balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

A quick lunch at Koreatown later, we made an opportunistic visit to the California Science Centre. It was huge, and my nieces, with the boundless enthusiasm of children, bulldozed their way through the interactive exhibitions. But I, with my body still lagging behind in a different time zone, and after a full course of Korean food, and the warm afternoon sun, I admit that I was a limiting reagent. I was intermittently dozing on the benches of the exhibitions. Drat! It's not you, it's me. It's my incurable jet lag.

Jet lag makes it impossible to work my facial muscles into a smile, but I'm trying!

It took me a few days, but with the help of some cold medications to help ease my sleep-wake cycle into a new routine, I finally got into the swing of cooking. We retested recipes old and new. I ended up revamping my old matcha cheesecake recipe, and taking full advantage of the farmlands of California, we tested a bunch of fruit and nut-based ice cream recipes. There was a blueberry ice cream, fantastic with fresh blueberries, and a roasted strawberry ice cream that surpassed any other strawberry ice cream I'd had. There was an absurdly simple Cuisinart recipe that produced a sweet milky ice cream and was perfect with the contrast of salted whole pistachio. Best of all, the recipe which did not require eggs or cream cheese. It didn't even require us to cook the ingredients.

Sometime in between churning our batches of ice cream, I started describing Jeni Bauer, and how her cookbook introduced me to the wonders of Philadelphia-style ice cream. One opportunistic Google search away led me to find out that Jeni Splendid Ice Cream is just close by over the next suburb! I finally made it into her store, and had some of the most finely crafted ice cream. We both got a double scoop on a cone, and no regrets.

We took advantage of a weekend to visit Malibu. Aside from the famous beaches, I shook off the remnants of my jet-lag just in time to experience the Getty Villa. It was named after the oil magnate J. Paul Getty, who had a deep fascination with Roman life. When his personal collection of Roman artifacts outgrew his home, he bought a piece of land along Malibu's coast to house his hobby. But he didn't just want to settle for a regular building; in the spirit of the good ol' American can-do attitude, the Getty Villa was designed to be a replica of the famed Villa dei Papiri.

The ancient Villa dei Papiri was located in the town of Herculaneum, and during the eruption of Vesuvius, was buried in 79 AD together with the city of Pompeii. Reportedly home to a Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, father-in-law to Julius Caesar, Villa dei Papiri was considered to be one of the most luxurious housing of the Roman world in its heyday. Villa dei Papiri was named after the collection of papyrus scrolls unearthed during the excavation, and even today, it remains an active archaeological site. During our time there, an ongoing exhibition was showcasing recently excavated relics from a recent dig.

Mr Getty passed away before the building was completed in 1974, but the project was close to his heart. He had a hand in every aspect of the structure, from the prized Roman symmetry of the mansion, to the mosaic floors and frescoed walls. Attention was given to every aspect of the estate, from the types of plants they grow within the walls to the interior design. Multiple tours run at regular intervals, and are split according to the subject of the tour: there's one dedicated to the discussion of Roman architecture, while another may bring you out into the grounds to explore the herbs and botanics of ancient Rome. It was terrific, and the demarcation of these tours allow the tours to be led by subject specialists.

Aside from the tours, a virtual tour via handsets were available as well. Done in collaboration with the book series Percy Jackson, the family-friendly tour leads you around the Getty Villa estate as they talk about the ancient Roman culture and described the personalities of gods and goddesses of the Roman pantheon.

Though, not every section is family-friendly, and a particular walled-off section has a raunchy and explicit carving of Pan getting it on with a goat.

The undisputed place to have a meal in the area was Malibu Seafood. It was a long wait especially during peak hours, but as we feasted on perfectly-battered fish and oysters, there was no better way to spend a summer's sunset by the seaside.