We all talk about foods that are mouth-watering good. Like my dad’s char siu, his BBQ pork. I still remember: He’d lather strips of pork with his secret sauce. He’d hang the glazed pork on metal hooks and roast the pork in a small boxy oven that he used only for char siu. When his cha siu came out of the oven, it gleamed — smoking hot, shiny from the red glaze and the grease still sizzling … yum.
My dad, Bing K. Wong, worked in restaurants for decades, including his own takeout place in Covina, Calif., that he called Kun Ming Kitchen. It was a tough business. Succeeding, surviving wasn’t easy. So I can understand that with his best recipe, it was mums the word. He died a few years ago having never shared those recipes. So this isn’t one of his.
Nope, this comes from my wife, Jennifer. She’s one of those cooks who makes it look so easy. Of course, the secret is that it is easy. You can go online and find a recipe to make char siu from scratch with lots of individual ingredients. Or, like my wife, you use an off-the-shelf marinade and keep it simple.
Ingredients
- Pork butt or pork shoulder
- Lee Kum Kee Marinade Sauce
- Dark Soy Sauce
- Shaoxing cooking wine
- Ketchup
- Honey
Prep
She starts with 3 pounds of pork butt or pork shoulder, purchased at the Chinese supermarket preferably bone-less and without a cover of fat. Pork butt is typically fatter. She’ll cut the meat into two pieces, which is easier to work with.
She marinates the pork with roughly half a bottle of 14-ounce Lee Kum Kee Marinade Sauce — Char Siu Sauce (Chinese Barbecue Sauce). It has all the ingredients already pre-mixed: sugar, water, salt, fermented soybean paste (which is water, salt, soybeans, wheat flour), honey, soy sauce (which is water, salt, soybeans, wheat, caramel color, high fructose corn syrup), malt syrup (which is rice, barley malt), modified corn starch, dehydrated garlic, spices, acetic acid, and Red 40 food coloring.
That’s not enough for my wife. To punch up the taste and color, she also mixes in roughly a tablespoon each of dark soy sauce, Shaoxing cooking wine, and ketchup.
If the meat is cold and hard, she punches holes in it with a fork to get the sauce to really sink in.
Then she put the marinated pork in the refrigerator overnight.
In the Oven
When it’s time to cook pork, she roasts it on an aluminum foil-lined pan in the oven at 400 degrees for an hour — half an hour on each side.
For the final 10 minutes or so, she bastes a final glaze of honey. Yeah, the Lee Kum Kee already has honey, but you can never have too much.
Check regularly during these final minutes. You may need to cook longer or shorter depending on the thickness of your pork.
It’s probably done when the outside starts to blacken, but don’t let it burn. Cut it open a little to double-check. Pork should be cooked to an internal temperature of 160 degrees.
That’s it. The char siu comes out of the oven gleaming — not quite as red and fat as my dad’s char siu, but pretty darn good. And so much less work. Enjoy!
