JuliaOne of my favorite Taiwanese recipes — oil rice or yóu fàn — with homemade Haishan sauce.
This is one of the dishes that turned me to cooking with lard which makes the flavor shockingly different. I now even have a lard jar in my fridge.
It looks like I am not the only one on lard and tallow. Pork and beef fat used to be free — just ask any butcher at any supermarket for scraps of the fat and they gladly pack you some on a styrofoam tray. Not any more. Especially at the stores like H Mart or 99ranch — my favorite in our area. Fat is now neatly prepackaged and laid out on a shelf with a price tag attached to it.
Oil rice features glistening sticky rice flavored with thin strips of shiitake and dried shrimp. A small amount of matchstick pork pieces, bamboo shoots, and carrots add to the texture.
Among other ingredients are soy sauce, michiu, black vinegar, shallots, dnd garlic. Oh, yes, and sugar! Very important. Taiwanese food is distinctly more mild and sweet compared to other Asian cuisines. It is strikingly different from food in Sichuan, Hunan, Shaanxi, Xinjiang, Beijing, Canton, and even Yunnan — those few cuisines that I learned to somewhat recognize. Sugar does not make Taiwanese food sugary. Combined with lard, it rather softens intense spicy-sour-bitter notes adding a different kind of depth and umami.
#food #cooking #taiwanesefood #oilrice #youfan
This is one of the dishes that turned me to cooking with lard which makes the flavor shockingly different. I now even have a lard jar in my fridge.
It looks like I am not the only one on lard and tallow. Pork and beef fat used to be free — just ask any butcher at any supermarket for scraps of the fat and they gladly pack you some on a styrofoam tray. Not any more. Especially at the stores like H Mart or 99ranch — my favorite in our area. Fat is now neatly prepackaged and laid out on a shelf with a price tag attached to it.
Oil rice features glistening sticky rice flavored with thin strips of shiitake and dried shrimp. A small amount of matchstick pork pieces, bamboo shoots, and carrots add to the texture.
Among other ingredients are soy sauce, michiu, black vinegar, shallots, dnd garlic. Oh, yes, and sugar! Very important. Taiwanese food is distinctly more mild and sweet compared to other Asian cuisines. It is strikingly different from food in Sichuan, Hunan, Shaanxi, Xinjiang, Beijing, Canton, and even Yunnan — those few cuisines that I learned to somewhat recognize. Sugar does not make Taiwanese food sugary. Combined with lard, it rather softens intense spicy-sour-bitter notes adding a different kind of depth and umami.
#food #cooking #taiwanesefood #oilrice #youfan
