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Char Siu

Char Siu

Char siu, literally "fork-roasted" in Cantonese, is the lacquered red barbecue pork that hangs in the windows of siu mei shops across Hong Kong, Guangzhou and any Cantonese diaspora neighbourhood worth knowing. Traditionally long strips of pork are skewered on hooks and lowered into vertical ovens or charcoal pits, where the marinade caramelises into a shimmering, almost brittle crust while the inside stays juicy and pink at the edges. The marinade is a careful balance: hoisin sauce for sweetness and body, light and dark soy for salt and colour, Shaoxing wine for aromatics, five-spice for warmth, fermented red bean curd (nam yu) for the deep umami funk that distinguishes shop-quality char siu from home attempts, and a final glaze of maltose syrup thinned with honey for that characteristic glossy finish. Pork shoulder is the cut of choice because the marbling keeps the meat moist through high-heat roasting; lean cuts like loin go dry and stringy. The classic colour comes from a small amount of red yeast rice or, in modern home recipes, a touch of red food colour, though the dish tastes the same without it. Difficulty is moderate. The marinade needs overnight, and the roasting needs your attention for the final glazing turns under high heat, but the technique itself is straightforward. Serve over rice with greens, in a soft bao bun, or chopped onto wonton noodles.

Chinese 1 hour 10 minutes Serves6
Jerk Meatballs in Coconut Curry Sauce

Jerk Meatballs in Coconut Curry Sauce

Two strong Caribbean flavours pulled into a single one-pan dinner: jerk on the inside (in the meatballs), curry on the outside (in the sauce). The meatballs are pork rather than the more common beef, which suits jerk better, pork carries the allspice-and-Scotch-bonnet seasoning the way it was historically intended (the Maroons of eastern Jamaica originally jerked wild boar, not chicken). Around them sits a coconut-curry sauce: shallot, garlic, sweet bell peppers, Jamaican curry powder bloomed briefly in butter, then full-fat coconut milk to mellow everything into something almost ice-cream-rich. The two flavours sit alongside each other rather than fighting, the jerk reads spicy-savoury, the curry reads sweet-aromatic, and a bite that includes both is genuinely better than either alone. Smell is curry powder bloomed in coconut milk, deeply Caribbean. One of the easier dishes here, 50 minutes start to finish, all in one pan, and a modern Black-American food-blogger creation rather than a traditional Jamaican dish; the cross-pollination is the point.

Jamaican 50 minutes Serves4
Jiaozi

Jiaozi

A hot-water dough - flour mixed with water (just-boiled) - for a tender, slightly stretchy wrapper that doesn't dry out. The filling is the classic family recipe: minced pork and finely chopped Chinese chives bound with soy, sesame oil, ginger and shaoxing wine. Each dumpling rolled thin, filled with a generous teaspoon, pleated along one edge, sealed and shaped. Boiled in batches, with the "three-cup" trick of adding cold water between waves to stop the wrappers blistering. Served with a sharp black vinegar and chilli dipping sauce.

Snacks 1 hour 12 minutes Serves4
Mala Dry-Pot (Ganguo)

Mala Dry-Pot (Ganguo)

Ganguo, literally "dry pot", is the dry sister of hotpot. Where hotpot is a communal soup simmered at the table, dry pot is a wok composition: each ingredient pre-cooked separately, then everything tossed together at the last moment in a fragrant mala sauce based on Pixian doubanjiang, fermented black beans and chilli oil. The result lands somewhere between a stir-fry, a casserole and a giant heap of bar snacks. The dish is usually credited to Chongqing in the 1990s and exploded into nationwide popularity in the 2000s; it now anchors the menu of countless ganguo restaurants where you point at ingredients on a fridge and they appear minutes later in a single-handled wok at your table. Difficulty for a home cook is low if you accept the rhythm: blanch the vegetables, sear the proteins, then build the final dish from already-cooked components. The trick is restraint with the sauce, generous heat under the wok, and the willingness to commit to a long ingredient list. The recipe is endlessly flexible: lotus root, potato, cauliflower, mushrooms, squid, chicken wings, beef, fish balls, tofu skin, whatever you have, in any combination, totalling 1-1 ½ kg.

Chinese 50 minutes Serves4
Phaksha Paa

Phaksha Paa

A Bhutanese pork belly braise that leans Sichuanese on the spice rack, the Himalayan border showing in the dish. You cut pork belly into thumb-length strips and start it on its own in a heavy pot to render the fat and brown the meat properly, the rendered juices becoming the cooking fat for everything that follows. Then in go whole dried red chillies, daikon cut into chunks, ginger, garlic, a measure of soy and a generous spoon of Sichuan pepper, and the lot braises gently in the pork's own rendered juices until the radish has gone soft and the sauce has thickened into a glossy red-brown lacquer that coats the pork. The whole chillies sit in the pot still intact, and the cook at the table can choose to eat them or push them to one side. Eaten with red Bhutanese rice, the broth ladled over.

Bhutanese 1 hour 15 minutes Serves4
Pork Pie

Pork Pie

Pork shoulder (uncured, fatty) and a small amount of bacon are chopped into 5 mm dice (not minced, the texture is key). Mixed with white pepper, mace, sage, salt and a touch of anchovy paste for umami. The hot-water-crust pastry: flour is mixed with hot water-and-lard mixture, kneaded warm into a pliable dough. Two-thirds of the dough lines a tall round tin (or is moulded freestanding around a glass jar); the filling is packed in tight; a lid of remaining dough is laid over the top with a 1 cm steam hole punched. Baked at 200°C for 30 min, then 160°C for another 60-75 min. Left to cool. A rich pork stock (made from trotters or with gelatin sheets) is poured through the steam hole while the pie is still warm. Refrigerated overnight to set the jelly. Sliced and eaten cold.

Snacks 3 hours 15 minutes Serves6
Pork Sorpotel

Pork Sorpotel

Pork shoulder and liver are par-boiled with whole spices, then diced. A masala paste of roasted Kashmiri chillies, peppercorns, cinnamon, cloves and cumin is ground with garlic, ginger and a generous splash of palm vinegar. The diced meat is browned in pork fat, the paste fried until the oil separates, and the cooking stock added for a slow simmer. The dish improves dramatically after 24-48 hours in the fridge; Goans traditionally make it the day before serving.

Goan 2 hours 30 minutes Serves6-8
Rougaille Saucisse

Rougaille Saucisse

Rougaille is the workhorse tomato sauce of Mauritian Creole cooking, used as a condiment with dholl puri, as a sauce for fried fish, and (most often) as the base of a one-pot meal with sausage, salt cod or eggs. The structure is simple but specific: onion softened slowly in oil, then ginger, garlic, chilli and fresh thyme bloomed in that oil, then a long-cooked mound of ripe tomatoes broken down until the oil splits and the sauce darkens. No curry powder, no garam masala, no coconut milk; rougaille belongs to the Creole rather than the Indo-Mauritian tradition, and its identity is the herbal punch of thyme and ginger against tomato. Rougaille saucisse, the version with smoked Mauritian-style sausages, is the textbook home preparation. Use any decent smoked, coarse-cut pork sausage; in the UK, smoked chipolatas or Polish kielbasa are good stand-ins. Difficulty is low and the cook is mostly passive. Serve with rice, a few leaves of bredes (sauteed greens) and a chilli pickle on the side.

Mauritian 55 minutes Serves4
Roujiamo (Xi'an Chinese Hamburger)

Roujiamo (Xi'an Chinese Hamburger)

Roujiamo is often, lazily, called the Chinese hamburger, but it is older than the burger by perhaps a thousand years and structurally quite different. The bread is a flat, lightly leavened, sometimes laminated wheat round, with the layered Tongguan style (flaky and croissant-like) considered superior to the softer baijimo. The filling is rich braised pork, shoulder or belly, simmered with rock sugar, soy and warming spice until it shreds under a knife, then chopped fine on a board with raw onion and cilantro and a spoonful of its own dark cooking liquid. The whole assembly is then crammed inside the freshly fried-and-baked bun while everything is still hot. Roujiamo is a quintessentially Xi'an dish, the product of a city that for centuries sat at the eastern terminus of the Silk Road; the bread tradition comes from the Hui and Uyghur Muslim communities of the northwest, while the braised pork belongs to the Han Chinese kitchen. Difficulty for a home cook is moderate to high, the lamination of the bread takes practice, and there are multiple components on timed tracks, but the result is one of the great street foods of China, and the buns and meat can both be made ahead.

Chinese 5 hours Serves4
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