This dish brings me back to my days in high school when I would order Lu Rou Fan with less Fan (rice) at the 菜饭 auntie's stall! Honestly, I can't remember the last time I had a good Lu Rou Fan. Was it really back in high school? Either way, I hadn't had it in a loooong time and the wintry wasteland that is Berlin (JK, I still love you Berlin) was making me nostalgic. Plus Ladyironchef's posts from Taiwan were making me extremely jealous and hungry, so I decided to embark on a new culinary adventure: braising my own Lu Rou Fan. In all honesty, it's actually a very easy dish to make. The only hard part is finding all the ingredients cheaply in Germany. So this post will not only comprise of a recipe, but also some tips and tricks I have on how/ where to go to shop for the ingredients cheaply. Let's go!
First off, look at how gorgeous this looks. Fluffy rice, topped with decadently fatty pork belly, hardboiled egg(my personal favourite part of the dish, aside from the pork belly of course) and a heavily spiced sauce to top it all off. Not to toot my own horn here, but it tastes even better. Enough of the food porn though, what you want to know is, what do I need to get? Well, here goes. You're going to need (for 3-4 servings):
Ingredients
- 500 g of fatty pork belly, cut into small pieces (but don't cut the fat away from the meat! Make sure the each piece has a good distribution of fat and meat)
- 1 shallot, diced
- Shiitake mushrooms (to your liking), sliced
- 2.5 tsps granulated sugar
- Vegetable oil
- 0.5 cups of Shaoxing or Hua Diao wine
- 4 cups of water
- 6 tbsps of light soy sauce (or the regular kind of soy sauce everyone is familiar with)
- 4 tbsps of dark soy sauce (this is darker and thicker than light soy sauce)
- Hardboiled eggs, peeled (as many as you want, I used 3)
- Firm Tofu (quartered, or whatever size you'd like)
For the spice packet:
- 5 pieces of star anise
- 1 cinnamon Stick
- 6-8 cloves
- 3 bay leaves
- 4 thin slices of fresh ginger
First off, some notes about the ingredients. Can't find pork belly in your local Lidl? You won't find it there. You're going to need to go somewhere with a proper meat counter, and that can either be your local Metzgerei(butcher's) , or you can find good meat counters in big supermarkets like Real or Kaisers. I got mine for approximately 1.78 euros at my local Kaisers. Total bargain if you ask me.
The Hua Diao wine was a bitch to find. No idea why, but a lot of the little Asian markets (and even the huge Asian Warehouse in Dong Xuan) here in Berlin don't stock Shaoxing wine or Hua Diao Jiu! Well, I finally found a place that sells Hua Diao Jiu in Tempelhof, in the AsiaGo supermarket. Since it's a chain, I assume any AsiaGo supermarket should have it. Look in the alcohol section, along with the sakes and what not. You can find almost all the other ingredients there as well, including the firm tofu. Take note, this isn't silken tofu that you find in hotpots and miso soup, but a firmer variety that can also be sold under the name Tau Kwa. The Natur Tofu that they sell at DM is also of this variety.
HOWEVER, some Asian supermarkets may only sell the star anise and cinnamon sticks in huge packs that you will never finish unless you open up a food truck and start selling lu rou fan for the rest of your life. So, an alternative, if you're too lazy to go to an Asian supermarket, is to just head to your local big supermarkets (aka, not discount retailers like Lidl and Aldi) such as Kaisers, Real or Edeka and head to the spice section. I know for a fact that my local Kaisers definitely stocks all the spices that you need, BUT they're crazy expensive. One small pack alone of about what, less than 10g could cost you up to 2.99 a pack. To paraphrase Sweet Brown, ain't nobody got cash fo dat. So I have yet another alternative for you. Either you go around all the Asian supermarkets looking for places that sell these spices in reasonably small, cheap packets, OR you head to the Asia-Markt in Alexanderplatz (yes, the place is literally just called Asia-Markt). It'll be listed as one of the shops in the Alexa mall at Alexanderplatz, but it's actually a shop outside, underneath the S-bahn tracks.
There you should be able to find a pack like the one in the photo above. I have no idea what it says because I am not Vietnamese. But it doesn't matter, because it also says in English that it contains cinnamon sticks, star anise and cardamom(which you won't need in this recipe, but might come in handy for something else). For only 1.79 a pack. Inside the pack you should find enough star anise and cinnamon sticks for you to cook about 4-5 rounds of this recipe, so 1.79 for this, compared to 2.99 per pack of ingredients that you'd find at Kaisers, you tell me which is the better deal.
Now that you've got all the ingredients, let's move on to how to cook it.
Method:
- Blanch the pork belly pieces in boiling water for 2 minutes, then remove and wash.
- Heat the oil and sugar on low heat in the pot you're going to use, until the sugar has melted.
- Stir-fry the shallots on medium high heat until translucent, then add shiitake mushrooms and stir fry for a couple of minutes more.
- Add the pork belly pieces, water, dark soy sauce, light soy sauce and Hua Diao or Shaoxing wine, and bring to a boil.
- Once you've brought it to a boil, add the spices. (Tip, to easily remove spices later, put spices in either a cheesecloth, or coffee/tea filter bag)
- Add the tofu and peeled hardboiled eggs to the mixture and cover the pot.
- Simmer for one and a half hours.
And that's all there is to it! Now you have all you need to make a steaming bowl of Lu Rou Fan to tide you over these cold, winter days.
