Warning: if you are interested in healthy, low-fat recipes, GET OUT NOW!
I discovered this dish, or something very like it, at the Ginger Garden restaurant in Amherst. When I first moved to the area at the dawn of the new millennium, Ginger Garden was a very ordinary Chinese food joint, with a big all-you-can-eat buffet of General Tso's chicken and Hunan beef and lo mein and fried chicken fingers. I sometimes took my daughter there after school when I couldn't face Friendly's yet again. When she stopped going to school in Amherst, I stopped going to the restaurant.
A couple of years ago I went back and was astonished at how much the place had changed. Apparently it's under new ownership and they did a major overhaul of the menu — and the cooking. It's good now. One even sees Chinese students from the local colleges eating there, which wasn't true before.
One of the new dishes on the menu was an amazing dish of pork and green onions, deliciously rich. I enjoyed it immensely and it quickly became one of the things I looked for on the menu at Chinese restaurants. A few other places have it.
I hadn't really thought about making it myself until a specialty butcher shop called Sutter Meats opened in Northampton. It's full of artisanal sausage and free-range pork and locally-sourced chicken and home-schooled beef and the like. It has become my main connection now for things like pigs' feet and duck confit. And one afternoon I noticed that they sold . . . pork belly.
Hmm. I know a pork belly dish I'd like to make, I thought. How hard could it be?
So I bought a couple of pounds and hunted up a recipe on-line, then cooked it for the family. Just recently I made it again for company, so the following account is sort of a hybrid of the two cooking experiences.
First of all, the big confession: if you can get three pounds of pork belly and have all afternoon to spend in the kitchen, this dish is actually very simple. Pig-easy, one might say.
Get three pounds of pork belly with the skin removed. Dice the pork into one-inch by one-half-inch pieces. Put it in a pot of water and bring to a boil, then pour off the water and put the meat aside. (I'm not 100 percent sure if this stage is necessary if you're using good-quality pork belly from a selective butcher, but it doesn't seem to do any harm.)
Then chop up about 1 cubic inch of peeled ginger. Cut half a dozen green onions into three-inch segments (for the bigger ones I cut them in half lengthwise. Use a little oil in the pot and sauté the ginger and onions for just a minute, then add 1 cup of soy sauce, 1 cup of water, 1/4 cup of dry white wine, and some black pepper. Bring the mix to a boil and add 1/3 cup of packed brown sugar. (I've been tempted to try a little molasses in place of the sugar.) Then put the meat in, get it just barely simmering, and let it cook.
For FOUR HOURS.
Stir occasionally.
When it's done, the meat has shrunk a good deal, because of course pork belly is about 75 percent fat and a lot of that is rendered out. Scoop off the layer of clear liquid fat and put it aside. If you can't find a use for a couple of pints of rendered pork fat flavored with ginger, you're just not applying yourself.
The texture was described by my youngest guest as "melty." Yes, you're basically eating cubes of soy-flavored fat, and it's wonderful. Serve over rice or noodles, and for God's sake have some kind of vegetables with it so your gall bladder doesn't try to crawl up your esophagus and run away from home. Cabbage is always good with pork. (The restaurant version had more green onion on the plate. Since the onion cooked with the pork completely disappears into the sauce, I'm betting they stir-fried some more onion and added it at serving time. I may try that, too.)
Verdict: yum.
For stories which are also good with pork, buy my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!
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