07.31.08

Ruby Pork with Three Roots

Posted in Uncategorized, chinese, cooking, food, how to, ingredients, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes at 1:23 pm by Hanne Blank

I did a sort of scary thing last week, namely, I improvised a Chinese dish using a rather non-Chinese primary vegetable, the beet. It turned out well, so today I reenacted it, made a few measurements, and took a few pictures so I could share it.

Now, I am a big fan of beets, and so is my Belovedary, so I figured that even if it didn’t taste very Chinese it would probably be edible, and pleasant to us. But I spent a little while thinking about it, and doing my best to think through the properties of beetroot from a Chinese culinary perspective, and here is what I decided:

To the qualities sweet, dense, fibrous, and resilient I decided it would be good to add fibrous, bright, and hot in the form of ginger, and slippery, smooth, and pungent in the form of onion. (It’s no accident that these are often paired with beets in non-Chinese cooking, too!) I chose pork for the meat because it was what we had, and pork is also the fallback meat of Chinese cooking so it made sense from that perspective as well. Pork also has an enthusiastic affinity for sweetness that some other meats (seafood and beef especially) can lack. To ground it and bring it all together, I chose brown bean sauce, which is made from the lees of the soybeans fermented to make soy sauce, thinned with Chiankiang vinegar, a dark brown/black rice-based vinegar with a taste a lot like the more familiar grape-based balsamic vinegar.

The lineup of ingredients.  Left to right, bottles: chiankiang vinegar, brown bean sauce, rice wine, soy sauce.  On cutting board, clockwise from upper left: beets, onion, pork, garlic clove, ginger root.

Wok-cooking beets posed a problem. Because beets are so dense and fibrous, they take a fair amount of cooking, more than most vegetables that are traditionally wok-cooked. But I needed to be able to stir-fry them, with a minimum of needing to leave the beets sitting around for long periods in the wok, and I really didn’t feel like pre-cooking (although blanching small pieces would certainly have been another option, it was one I did not want to take).

Chinese cooks usually solve these kinds of cooking time problems via the expedient of knifework, and so I did the same, and simply peeled and julienned the three beets.

For the ginger, I thought a little trompe l’oeil was in order. Beets stain everything, and since it was obvious from the get-go that everything coming out of my wok tonight was going to be red, I figured it would be an amusing thing to have the ginger be visually indistinguishable from the beets. So I julienned a five-ounce piece of fresh ginger, making sure the pieces were of roughly similar size to the beets.  As is probably obvious, ginger, in my house, is sometimes a vegetable, not just an aromatic flavoring.  Those with Ginger Fear, be advised.

I wanted to highlight the slippery, smooth, yielding texture of the onions as a contrast to the firmness of the beets. I peeled and halved them, then sliced them pole-to-poleways into slices that were thin but not paper-thin, the better to have the heat of the wok soften them quickly, but so they’d still retain some tooth.

The pork I sliced against the grain into thin slices and marinated in 1 Tablespoon Xiao Xing wine, 2 teaspoons soy sauce, and a crushed garlic clove (this, to the Chinese tastebuds, clarifies the taste of meats, and almost all meats are marinated before cooking in some mixture involving wine/liquor, soy, and either ginger or garlic).

Last, I stirred together two Tablespoons of brown bean sauce and the same amount of Chiankiang vinegar and set it aside.

As the last step before I started cooking, I made sure my mise en place was all ready to roll… and then I fired up the wok and stopped taking pictures, because you can’t stir-fry and hold a camera at the same time.

I stir-fried the beets and ginger together, on the principle that the hardest vegetables go into the wok first. When the beets were getting to the crisp-tender stage and didn’t taste raw any more (this took about 3-4 minutes of cooking, I would guess), I put in the onions and tossed them well. The onions gave off some liquid which helped steam the beets and ginger quickly, and about two or three minutes later I removed the vegetables to a dish and reheated the wok to cook the pork.

Cooking meat separately, then adding it back into cooked (or mostly-cooked) vegetables is another classic Chinese technique. It is usually only with shellfish that the meat is added to the stir-fry wok when the vegetables are still in it. This makes a lot of sense: meat and vegetables require different cooking times, and meat also releases a lot of water when it cooks. Both the difference in cooking time and the additional water can ruin vegetables, so it is quite useful to do them separately.

Many recipes call for pre-cooking the vegetables until they are almost, but not quite, to the point of doneness that is desired, then cooking the meat, then adding the vegetables to the meat when the meat is 95% cooked, briefly stirring the two together to heat everything up evenly and finish the cooking process, then tossing with whatever flavoring or sauce finishes the dish. This allows the meat juices to become part of the dish without adversely affecting the cooking or the condition of the vegetables.

This is what I did tonight, adding the beet mixture back in when the pork had all become opaque and whitish. Then I poured in the brown bean sauce that I had prepared earlier, tossed it to combine everything properly, and we were done.  To finish the dish off, I tossed in a small handful of cilantro leaves.  You could use very finely diced green onion, if you prefer.  The point of these little last-minute additions, in Chinese cookery, is to add color, a little bit of textural contrast, and brightness of flavor.

It was very tasty. The ginger masquerading as beets is very successful, both surprising (hey, that’s not a beet!) and a good partner with the beets, the heat of the ginger making the beets more exciting and the sweet earthiness of the beets standing up just fine to that amount of ginger.  The onions were voluptuous.  The sauce was tangy and salty and savory.

A plus: it turns the rice in your bowl BRIGHT RED! Which is exciting, and in a Chinese context, meaningful, as red is the color of happiness and prosperity and success.

Ingredients for Ruby Pork with Three Roots

• 3 medium beets
• 1 largish onion
• about 5 ounces by weight fresh ginger root
• about 4 ounces boneless pork (I used pork loin because that’s what I had, use a lean cut)
• 1 clove garlic
• marinade for pork: 1 crushed garlic clove, 1 T Xiao Xing wine or sherry, 2 t soy sauce
• sauce for dish: 2 T brown bean sauce, 2 T Chiankiang vinegar

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