BBQ Cooking - Week 6: Slow Cooked Beef Chuck Ribs+Roasted Whole Piglet-Chinese Wedding Style!

This was the last class for the BBQ cooking course. We made Slow Cooked Beef Chuck Ribs, Grilled Back Ribs with Tunnel Style Sweet and Hot Sauce, Grilled Hot Banana Peppers. My group job was to remove the seeds from a couple hundred banana peppers and then stuff them with rice. My poor bare hands were coated with capsaicin and I could still feel the burning sensations even 3 days after the exposure. Believe me, I tried everything I can to remove those bugger capsaicin molecules, including washing my hands with olive oil and even a small amount of acetone from the lab. Nothing worked. So if you ever have to do the same task, make sure that you wear a pair of gloves! Over all, this is a great course and I enjoyed it a lot! I learned exactly what I came here for, new cooking techniques that involve a BBQ. 

As it was the final class, our chef also showed us something extra -- a crispy baby pig that is commonly served at Cantonese Chinese weddings. 

For the baby pig, the chef first roasted it slowly in the oven at 300F. Once it's fully cooked after about 3hr, he put it on the rack over a large wok, and poured really hot oil all over its body. Literally, the pig was burned and the skin just popped open to become crispy. (sorry about the graphic description)

Slow Cooked Beef Chuck Ribs

Ingredients

4 bone rack beef chuck ribs (chuck ribs are the first 4 ribs of the animal)

1 onion, chopped

12 shallots, chopped

1 carrot, chopped

1 celery stalk, chopped

6 garlic

500 mL red wine

1 L beef stock

1 L chicken stock

200 mL crushed tomatoes

1 bay leaf

Methods

1. rub chuck ribs with general some rub mixture (basically you can make a dry rub using whatever spices you want, i.e. chilli powder, garlic powder, curry powder, peppercorn, etc)

2. in a pan, heat some oil to brown the ribs

3. add onion/celery/carrot/shallot/garlic

4. add red wine and stock, simmer for a few minutes

5. add crushed tomatoes, bring the braising pan to the oven

6. slow cook the meat at 325F for about 2 hrs, take the meat out to rest, keep cooking the liquid to reduce it to a thick sauce

BBQ Cooking - Week 5: Chinese BBQ pork!

I have been waiting for this week's class since the beginning of the course, and finally, I got to learn how to make Cha Shao (Mandarin), or Char Siu (Cantonese), or you may know it as the Chinese BBQ pork-the China town style! At first I was pretty sceptical about learning how to make a traditional Chinese dish from my Canadian chef. It would be like learning pop culture from your parents. But then I had to bite my tongue really hard after I tried his cha shao, which is the most amazing cha shao that I've ever had in my 20 some-odd years of existence! The key to success lies in the marinade. I have tried to replicate the marinade at home, compared to the chef's gold standard, and I can say this with confidence: if you follow the recipe below, you will get the BEST cha shao ever!

Ingredients

3 lb pork shoulder (or sometimes it's called the pork butt, same thing)

Marinade

300 mL hoisin sauce

200 mL oyster sauce

100 mL honey

50 mL light soy  sauce

30 mL Chinese cooking wine/brandy

5 g ground cinnamon

5 g ground Sichuan peppercorn

5 g ground star anise

3 cloves of whole garlic

We hang the meat in this industrial oven in class, but you can also cook it in your own oven in a roasting pan. 

Methods

1. Mix everything together and marinade the pork overnight

2. Take a deep roasting pan with a rack in it. Add about 1 cm of water to the tray. Put the pork on top of the rack. (I don't have a baking rack, so I just rolled some aluminium foil into rods with a diameter of about 2 cm. I raised my pork above the water using the rods). The water in the pan will create some steam in your oven to tenderize the meat, as well as to collect the drippings from the marinade. The flavourful liquid will eventually become the sauce that you can serve with the meat and rice. 

3. Bake the meat at 300F for 1.5hr, basting the surface of the meat repeatedly every 15min or so. After 1.5 hr, increase the temperature to 450F and bake another 10 min. During the final high-temperature stage, the sugar coated on the pork surface will caramelize and give you a natural red colour (unlike the red food colouring used in many restaurants). 

4. Let the meat rest for a few minutes and slice thinly. 

If you ever try this recipe at home, let me know how it turns out. Really excited to hear about your experience with this recipe! 

BBQ Cooking - Week 2: Pulled Pork Burgers!

Our BBQ class got postponed for 2 weeks because of the Victoria Day long weekend and  Memorial Day (our chef went to visit families in the States). The long wait was highly anticipated and it was totally worth it! Despite the labour intensive cooking session, it was a fruitful class that generated many meals for the following week and many happy stomachs. 

To assemble the perfect pulled pork burgers, we prepared Slow cooked BBQ pork butts with Sweet chili and smoked paprika rub,  Bourbon BBQ sauce, Blue cheese coleslaw, Caramelized onions, and calabrese buns. 

Ingredients

Rub (for 10 lb pork butt):

1 cup smoked paprika
1/4 sweet dried ground chili
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 kosher salt
1 tbsp cayenne pepper
2 tbsp black pepper
1 tbsp garlic powder 
1 tbsp onion powder

BBQ sauce:

2 cups Heinz chili sauce
1 cup ketchup
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 perpared mustard
1/4 cup cider vinegar
90 mL Bourbon 
4 crushed garlic cloves
1 small onion, diced
1 red pepper, diced
2 dried red chilies
1pc star anise
30 mL vegetable oil
salt to taste

Methods

1. Mix all the ingredients for the rub, coat the pork butt with the dry rub

2. Place the meat in the smoker for about 1hr, then transfer the meat to the oven to continue  

    roasting at 300F for another 2 hrs. 

 * you can slow cook the meat in the oven the whole time if you don't have a smoker

3. For the sauce, in a large pan, sweat the onion, red pepper and chilies until soft

4. Add Bourbon or whiskey and reduce the volume by half

5. Add sugar, stir and wait until it's dissolved. Add remaining ingredients and simmer until    

    desired consistency

6. Use a food processor to purée the sauce

For the Blue cheese coleslaw:

Ingredients for the dressing

100 g blue cheese

1/4cup cider vinegar

1/2 sour cream

1/2 bunch chives, chopped

salt/pepper to taste

Methods

1. Mix all the dressing ingredients together for the coleslaw. 

Voilà, the best pulled pork burger that I've  ever had! 

French-Week 8: Pork Wellington!

When I saw this week's recipe Fielt de Porc Wellington in class, the first thing jumped into my mind was, Oxford! I still remember the first time that I had beef Wellington. It was in the summer of 1999, when I attended a summer school in Oxford, England to study English. School usually finished around 3pm on weekdays, and after that my friends and I would spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around on High Street, shopping, taking pictures, and of course, snacking on local food like Fish and Chips, pastries, and Wellington before heading back to our host families for the real dinner. So as you can imagine, I was pretty excited to recreate the food from my memories this week! If you are like me and wondering why a traditional British dish showing up in a French cooking class, you would find this inconclusive explanation on wiki:

"Some theories suggest beef Wellington is named after Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington; other theories go a step further and suggest this was due to his love of a dish of beef, truffles, mushrooms, Madeira wine, and pâté cooked in pastry, but with a noted lack of evidence to support this. Other accounts simply credit the name to a patriotic chef wanting to give an English name to a variation on the French filet de bœuf en croûte during the Napoleonic War."

British or French, the important thing is, Wellington tastes great!! And it takes a lot less work than I thought it would. Here's how:

Ingredients

1 pork tenderloin

300g Puff pastry

half onion, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

1.5 lb of mushrooms (about 2 boxes), pureed by food processor

1 egg

butter, salt/pepper

Method

1. remove the silver skin/fat from the tenderloin

2. rub salt and pepper onto the surface of the meat

3. add butter into a pan, brown both sides of meat, and let it sit aside

4. in a second pan, add olive oil, sweat the onions

5. add chopped garlic

6. use a food processor to make a mushroom paste, and transfer the paste to the pan with onion/garlic

7. sweat the mushroom paste, and evaporate off the liquid that comes out of the mushrooms

8. adjust seasoning with salt and pepper

9. let the mixture sit aside and cool down

10. take Puff pastry out of the freezer right before use (it's hard to work with when it gets warm)

11. lay a layer of mushroom stuffing

12. place the browned tenderloin on top of the stuffing

13. roll the pastry and fillings into a log. 

14. brush the pastry on the edges with eggwash so that they will seal up. Cut off extra pastry. 

15. Brush the surface of the log with eggwash. Bake at 375F for 40min. 

* make sure you let the log rest for a few minutes before you cut it up, or the pastry will collapse. 

Pork Wellington

Because I had some leftover mushroom stuffing and extra button mushrooms, I decided to make them into stuffed mushroom caps and served them on the side. 

Stuffed mushroom 

Method

1. add oil in a pan, sweat 1/4 of chopped onion

2. add the mushroom stuff to pan, mix with onion (if you don't have the pureed mushroom from the Wellington, you can chop up the mushroom stems and use them instead)

3. let the mixture cool off for a bit, then add them into 1/2 cup of grated mozzarella cheese, mix well

4. stuff the mushroom caps with the mixture, grate parmesan cheese on top

5. bake at 375F for 20min

6. garnish with curly parsley