Image source: https://www.theminichef.com/chinese-braised-pork-belly-hong-shao-rou/.

Despite the thumbnail, this is not your beloved Chinese braised pork. This is my mom’s recipe, or rather, a recipe she made for me because I couldn’t be bothered to gather all the ingredients for the most authentic experience possible. Plus, I’m Vietnamese (despite being mistaken as Chinese every single time).

I like to call it simplified braised pork. So, here’s the recipe for simplified braised pork. All credits goes to my mom.

Ingredients

• 500g of pork belly
• Salt
• White vinegar
• Cooking wine
• 1 lemon
• 1 white onion
• 3 cloves of garlic
• Sugar
• Coconut water
• At most 6 chicken eggs

Pre-preparation

Pork belly

• Rinse pork belly under warm water to soften it (cuz you put it in the fridge after you bought it).
• Cut pork belly into pieces of 2cm width (that’s centimeters you’re looking at).
• Soak pork belly in a mixture of warm water, 2 tbps of salt, 2 tbps of vinegar, 2 tbps of wine, for 30 minutes. This gets rid of the raw pork smell, soften it further, and allows it to better absorb the seasonings.
• Dice white onion and garlic. Dice them to be as fine as possible. Or use a blender, that also works.
• After 30 minutes, put pork belly into a container (you can even use a ziploc bag). Add salt, onion, garlic and 1 tbps of lemon juice. Marinate pork belly in fridge for 3 hours.

Eggs

• Prepare a pot of water. Put all eggs into pot. Turn on stove to number 7.
• Wait for roughly 20 - 25 minutes. At around 15 minutes, water will start boiling, but do not turn off the stove just yet, since at this point, your eggs are only soft-boiled. You certainly do not want soft-boiled eggs for this dish. Trust me, I made my share of mistakes.
• Once eggs become hard-boiled, put them into a bowl of cold water. Then peel the eggs.
• After peeling, you may choose to cut each egg in half.

Cooking

• Grab a pot.
• Put 4 tbps of sugar into pot and perform caramelization. This gives a better flavor profile and color profile to the dish.
• Once you have obtained caramel, take pork belly out of the fridge and put it into pot.
• Add coconut water. You can add as much as you want.
• Put stove at number 5 and cook it for around 30 minutes.
• Add the hard-boiled eggs, put stove at number 3 and cook it for another 30 minutes.

There you have it!