Vol. XVI · Moist Heat Plate 5 of 11红烧, red-braising, 红烧肉, pork belly, soy sauce, rock sugar, Shaoxing wine, reduction, glaze, caramelisation, 收汁MF

Red-Braising.

红烧肉 is cooked twice in one pot: an hour of gentle braising, then a few minutes of hard boiling that turns thin liquid into lacquer.

Red-braising (红烧) gives Chinese cooking some of its best-loved dishes: 红烧肉 (pork belly), red-braised fish, aubergine, tofu. The meat is often blanched (XVI.2), browned or coloured in caramelised sugar (炒糖色), then braised in a little liquid flavoured with light and dark soy sauce, rock sugar, Shaoxing wine, ginger, scallion and spices such as star anise. It cooks gently, like any braise (XVI.4), until tender.

Then comes 收汁, reducing the sauce: the lid comes off and the heat goes up, and the liquid boils away. As the water leaves, the sugar and the soy's solids concentrate; the sauce thickens, its boiling point climbs above 100 °C (VII.6), and it begins to caramelise and brown by Maillard reactions with the soy's amino acids (VIII.4). The cook stirs constantly in the last minutes as the glaze clings and turns glossy, and stops before it scorches. The workshop reduces a red-braising liquid.

Below: the sugar concentration and boiling point of the braising liquid as it reduces from the volume you choose (water bench: syrup boiling point, other solids ignored), with the minutes it takes on a gas burner and the glaze range marked.

What you will learn
Workshop
Water bench: the liquid treated as a sugar syrup (sugar ÷ sugar plus water; the soy's salt and solids are ignored, which understates the boiling point a little); boiling point from the course syrup model. Evaporation on a 3 kW gas burner delivering 40 % to the pot, 70 % of it boiling water off: about 22 g a minute.

Boil it down to lacquer

Reducing 400 mL of braising liquid with 40 g of rock sugar down to 60 mL takes about 15 minutes on a home gas burner in this model; by then the sauce is about 40 % sugar and boils at about 101.1 °C. Take it to 30 mL and it boils at 102.7 °C; the soy's salt and solids, ignored here, push the real figure higher, and as the last water goes the temperature climbs fast towards the candy stages (VII.6): the glaze clings, and a moment too long scorches it.

Method for 红烧肉: blanch cubes of pork belly; fry them gently to render some fat; colour them with rock sugar melted to amber in the fat (炒糖色) or with dark soy; add Shaoxing wine, light and dark soy, ginger, scallion, star anise and hot water to just cover; simmer covered for an hour or more until a chopstick slides in; then uncover, raise the heat and reduce, stirring and turning the pork for the last few minutes until each piece is coated in a sticky, glossy glaze. Taste for salt only near the end: reduction concentrates the soy (XI.3).

At the stove

Make a small 红烧 of tofu or aubergine. When it is cooked, reduce the sauce with a thermometer in it and note the temperature when the glaze starts to cling to the spoon.

红烧肉 is tied in legend to the Song poet Su Dongpo (东坡肉), and in modern China to Mao Zedong's fondness for the Hunan version; Shanghai's 本帮 red-braising is the sweetest.

Terms

红烧
Red-braising: braising in soy sauce, sugar and wine, then reducing to a glaze.
收汁
Reducing the sauce at the end to thicken and glaze.
炒糖色
Melting sugar to caramel in oil to colour meat.
Rock sugar
Large crystals of sugar used in Chinese braises for a clean sweetness and gloss.
红烧 is a gentle braise in soy, sugar and wine, then a hard reduction: as water leaves, the sauce's boiling point climbs past 100 °C and it glazes — stir and stop before it scorches.

Sources

  1. Sugar syrup stages by temperature at sea level: thread 106–112 °C, soft ball 112–116 °C, firm ball 118–120 °C, hard ball 121–130 °C, soft crack 132–143 °C, hard crack 146–154 °C, caramel from about 160 °C (standard confectionery tables, e.g. the Culinary Institute of America, Baking and Pastry, 3rd ed., 2015).
  2. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.