Pork Belly with Mustard Greens
Pork Belly with Mustard Greens, a traditional Hakka dish
Pork belly has become popular over the last 5 years or so in the United States, showing up on the menus of some of the top restaurants around the country. Famous American chefs are now slow roasting pork belly with its delicious crackling skin, and they’re serving it as a topping or accompaniment to a wide variety of high culinary dishes.
Many people may be unaware, however, that pork belly cooked upside down, known as meicai kourou, is an ancient Chinese dish that has been a specialty of the little known Hakkas, or Guest People, who settled long ago in enclaves in the mountainous regions of Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangxi, and Fujian provinces.
My parents brought this wonderful recipe with them when they emigrated from China and sailed for Indonesia almost 100 years ago, during the Dutch colonial days. I grew up in Bali eating this delicious dish, and craved it when I was pregnant with my first child in New York in the late 1970s. I craved it so much that I called back to my home to ask my mom how she made it.
Ever since, I’ve been making meicai kourou wherever I was living, providing I was able to get the key ingredient, meigancai (梅乾菜) - dried preserved mustard greens — and pork belly with the skin on. I also enjoy making it because it reminds me of my roots and reaffirms my identity as a Hakka.
Here is the oral recipe handed-down to me from my mom:
Boil the pork belly with the skin on until you can pierce the meat easily with a chopstick.
Strain the boiled pork belly in a colander. Apply dark soy sauce over the skin several times to give it a nice caramel color. Rub salt all over the pork belly, except the skin. Let it cool completely and dry.
The next step is to deep fry the skin part. This is the most challenging part, because the oil tends to splash all over. I use a very deep pot, and get a screen to block the splashing oil. Use a medium-low heat, and never a high heat. You don’t want to burn the skin before it gets golden brown and bubbly.
Take out the meat and set aside to let it cool.
Slice the pork belly into 1/4-inch thickness. You must have a sharp knife to do the job.
Lay the sliced pork belly in the wok or frying pan, pan-fry on both sides over a low-medium heat to ooze out the fat; add 1 to 2 tablespoons of Shaoxing wine or rice wine and 2 tablespoons of soy sauce. Stir and toss the meat when both sides are a nice brown color. Then turn off the heat and scoop out the contents and set it aside to be assembled in a bowl later on. Keep the fat in this frying pan to sauté the chopped mustard greens.
While boiling the pork belly at the start, wash and rinse the presoaked dried preserved vegetables (you’ll need to do this for several hours or overnight).
Finely chop the strained dried preserved vegetables and set aside.
Add the chopped mustard greens into the remaining fat-soy sauce-wine after pan-frying the sliced pork belly. Add a little sugar to taste. Then add some water to keep it moist. You can smell the intoxicating aroma of the mustard greens at this point. Scoop out the mustard greens and you’re ready to combine it with the sliced pork belly.
Place the sliced pork belly with skin face down, lining the pieces up neatly in rows, a middle row, and left and right rows. Then top it with the sautéed chopped mustard greens. Put this in the steamer and steam for an hour.
It’s best to prepare this dish one day ahead of time, as it will taste even better the following day. The second steaming takes only 15 minutes or until it gets piping hot.
Meicai kourou is one of those humble dishes that can be elevated to a mouth-watering deliciousness simply by pairing fatty pork with dried preserved mustard greens, which will touch not just the palates of Chinese people, but everyone on earth.
A history of the Hakkas from my book Beijing Eats.
The Hakka, or “Guest People,” are the descendants of Chinese migrants who moved from the Yellow River valley region and resettled in southern China in the third century BC.
The rustic Hakka cuisine evolved from hundreds of years of hard living.
The first wave of Hakka migrants in the Qin dynasty (221-206 BC) were forced by severe persecution to flee southward from Shanxi and Henan toward Zhejiang, Fujian and Jiangsu provinces. New troubles in the fifth century AD pushed them further south, and between the 10th and 13th centuries, a large number of Hakka settled in Guangdong Province in southern China. The principal migration came at the end of the Southern Song (1127-1278 AD), when refugees settled in enclaves mainly in the mountainous Guangdong-Guangxi-Jiangxi-Fujian areas. Hakka settlements have been found as far west as Sichuan, in Taiwan, and even as far as countries in Southeast Asia.
As outsiders, the Hakka were often pushed to the least hospitable lands where they struggled to survive. As a result, they have a long tradition of being able to chi ku, or eat bitterness. If you travel in southern Fujian today, you’ll notice magnificent circular structures known as tulou (earth houses) dotting the valley. Some of these houses, which date back three centuries, were built as fortress-like dwellings to keep out bandits and attackers. The largest earth house can accommodate as many as 300 families. The tall clay and sandstone walls of the tulou are mortared with sticky red soil and are a very impressive sight in Southeast China.
The Hakka are a practical lot, and their food has an endearing simplicity of composition and taste. You will find no excessive extravagance or complex delicacies here. To the Hakka, a meal is not for gorging or titillating the palate, and their dishes can be described in simple terms: salty, hearty, fatty but not oily (油而不腻 you er bu ni).
The earthy food of the Hakka today is a throwback to the days when the men and women had to eke out a living by farming rugged terrain (unlike women elsewhere in China, Hakka women never bound their feet; they tilled the fields right alongside their men). A craving for salty foods was inevitable, and fatty foods were needed to fortify them with plenty of energy for hard daily labor. As they had little time to cook, dishes were prepared to taste good even when reheated and eaten days later.
Hard living made them resourceful and thrifty. Whenever a pig was slaughtered, no part went to waste; the Hakka are known for making delectable soups out of offal, including hamchoi zhudu tong (咸菜猪肚汤), pig’s stomach with fermented mustard greens, and funchong boqiuktong (粉肠煲曲汤), pig’s intestine with red kojic rice (红曲米 hongqu mi), a natural coloring agent which is said to contain medicinal properties, such as lowering blood sugar and cholesterol.
The use of preserved vegetables is the hallmark of Hakka cuisine; many lived in mountainous regions, far from supply routes, and therefore food preservation became crucial to survival. Root vegetables, such as turnip, radish, and bamboo shoots, were salted and dried – to be used sparingly as a flavoring. Meixian County, in northeastern Guangdong, is known for its excellent meigancai, or mustard greens, that have been preserved by drying.