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–+ servings

Ingredients

Yields: 1 pan
  • 500 g pork belly
  • 250 g preserved mustard greens - see notes
  • 5 cloves of garlic - minced
  • 2 shallots - minced
  • 1 thumb-sized knob of ginger - half of it sliced and the rest minced
  • 50 g vegetable oil - for frying
  • 30 g dark soy sauce
  • 15 g light soy sauce
  • 30 g Shaoxing Wine
  • 30 g brown sugar
  • 5 pieces of star anise
  • 2 cloves
  • (quite a bit of) salt
  • ground black pepper

Method

Season pork belly

  • Season the pork belly with salt and leave it in the refrigerator for 2 to 6 hours, or overnight if possible.

Prep mustard greens

  • Give the mustard greens a good wash, and soak them in water for roughly 5 hours or overnight, changing the water halfway through soaking if posstible. After soaking, remove them from the water, squeeze them dry and chop them up into small pieces. (You want a rough mince sorta texture here.)

Cook pork belly

  • Place pork belly in a pot of water, and add 3 star anise, sliced ginger, black pepper and a bit of salt. Bring the water to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove the pork from the pot and set on a wire rack to cool. When cool, place skin side up in the refrigerator for an hour or more to dry the skin. Reserve the porky broth and reduce by two-thirds to intensify the flavour.

Cook preserved veggie sauce

  • First, fry the garlic, ginger, and shallots in shallow oil. When lightly browned, add the preserved mustard greens and sauté for about 3 minutes. Then, add the light and dark soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, brown sugar, 2 star anise and cloves (the latter two ingredients can be placed in a small, permeable herb bag so they can be easily removed after cooking. Then, gradually add the pork stock to the veggies until it has a stew-like consistency (not too watery). Taste for seasoning as you add the pork stock as it might be too salty.

Sear pork belly

  • After drying the pork belly in the refrigerator, heat up some oil in a pan and sear the pork belly. Sear it first with the skin side down, then just lightly brown all other 5 sides. When the pork belly is seared, remove from the pan to cool it down slightly. Then slice into thin strips, about 1cm in width (yes I’m so used to the metric scale I can’t measure in inches…)

Final steaming

  • Spoon a bit of preserved veggie mix into a deep pan, then arrange the pork belly slices neatly on it. Then add the rest of the preserved veggies on top of the pork. Steam for 60 minutes. (See notes for alternative method.)

EAT.

  • This dish is best enjoyed steaming hot with a bowl of plain white rice or porridge (not the English sort) to soak up all the salty-sweet, saucy umami-rich goodness.

Notes

  • There are several types of preserved mustard greens (in Malaysia at least). As far as I know, there’s the sweet kind and the savoury kind, which comes in large heads. There’s also one that is sold in packets already cut into small slivers, which take a lot less time to soak. For this recipe, I used a roughly equal mixture of all three, but any combination of mustard greens should work fine!
  • An alternative (read: more traditional) way would be to arrange the pork belly slices in the base of small individual-portion-sized bowls, with the preserved mustard green mixture spooned on top. This then gets steamed the same way, and flipped onto a plate when serving, resulting in a visually-pleasing, super neat layer of pork belly on top.