Char Siu (Red Pork)

   At our house we love Chinese food, and as good as it is at a restaurant we love to make it ourselves. Now I probably should say I include any type of Asian, Thai, Japanese, and Chinese foods when I say Chinese. Whatever you want to call it we love eating and cooking it.  A couple weeks ago I found this giant cookbook, Gourmet, which was on sale for only $10, so of course I got it. I have found some really great recipes to try including this one for Char Siu. I have made it before but have misplaced the recipe and this one was a little different then I remembered so I gave it a try.

Char Siu Pork (Red Pork)

1 pound of pork butt or shoulder or tenderloin

¼ cup hoisin

¼ cup soy sauce

¼ cup rice wine vinegar

2 tbsp honey

1 ½ tsp ginger

1 tsp garlic

½ tsp salt
1 tsp red food coloring ( optional, I just like the color it gives)

Cut a pork tenderloin into strips, about an inch wide. Mine looked like this.

Take the pork slices, soy sauce, hoisin, ginger, garlic, rice wine, honey, and food coloring (optional) together in a bag and marinate for at least 4 hours. The recipe calls for hoisin sauce I only had a hoisin garlic marinade that worked just as well and it was nice to have because I was a little low on garlic clove.

Put a rack in the lower third of the oven. Fill a cake pan or roasting pan if you have it with about an inch of water, place a wire rack across the top of the pan. I used a cooling rack. 

Take the pork from the marinade and place the strips on to the rack as close to an inch apart as you can fit them.  KEEP the marinade. Roast at 375°F for 15 minutes.

In the mean time bring the marinade to a boiling a sauce pan, remove from heat.

Brush the marinade onto over the pork flip and brush the other side and roast 10 more minutes. 

Basting once

When it’s done baste again the same way as before, and cook again for 20 minutes  basting 2 or 3 more times. Increase temp to 400 and roast until caramelized on edges.

After they came out, see how they
got darker on the sides 

I cut my meat smaller  and thought that was too much cooking time I did about 30 minutes total. Just check  the temp of the meat, it needs to be about 155 -160.

Let the meat sit for 10 minutes after you take them out to rest.

While they rested, we made the
potstickers

Served over rice and with potstickers from the freezer aisle they are the best. I would suggest not using all your sauce to coat the meat that way you have some to put over the rice. 

Yummy Yummy 

This turned out surprisingly well for my first time with the recipe it was so good. I wished I had made more to eat the rest of the week.  Do you usually go out for Chinese or do you make your own? Whats your favorite kind?