This Chinatown Char Siu Ribs Recipe Tastes Great Cooked Indoors Or Out

Thunder Bay – FOOD – Char siu (叉烧) is a type of Cantonese roast meat. Char siu (or slightly different spelling, cha siu) is its Cantonese name, but in Mandarin, it is known as cha shao. To make char siu, pork is marinated in a sweet BBQ sauce and then roasted.

Over the years, the flavor of the char siu one could get in noodle shops and roast meat restaurants in Chinatowns around the world developed a signature sweetness. But today, many restaurants skimp on the spices!

INSTRUCTIONS
Cut the pork into long strips or chunks about 2 to 3 inches thick. Don’t trim any excess fat, as it will render off and add flavor.

Combine the sugar, salt, five spice powder, white pepper, sesame oil, wine, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, molasses, food coloring (if using), and garlic in a bowl to make the marinade (i.e. the BBQ sauce).

Reserve about 2 tablespoons of marinade and set it aside. Rub the pork with the rest of the marinade in a large bowl or baking dish. Cover and refrigerate overnight, or at least 8 hours. Cover and store the reserved marinade in the fridge as well.

Heat your oven to ‘bake’ at 475 F (246 C) with a rack positioned in the upper third of the oven. (If you only have a convection oven, keep in mind the oven not only heats more quickly, your char siu will roast faster than what we have described here).

It’s amazing how oven temperatures can vary—from model to model, in different spots in the oven, and in how ovens pre-heat and maintain heat. Using an oven thermometer to double-check the actual oven temperature is a great safeguard to monitor your food (I say double-check because even oven thermostat calibrations vary and can sometimes be incorrect).

Regardless, be sure to check your char siu every 10 minutes, reducing or increasing the temperature as needed.

Line a sheet pan with foil and place a metal rack on top. Using the metal rack keeps the pork off of the pan and allows it to roast more evenly, like it does in commercial ovens described above. Place the pork on the rack, leaving as much space as possible between pieces. Pour 1 ½ cups water into the pan below the rack. This prevents any drippings from burning or smoking.

Transfer the pork to your preheated oven.

Roast for 25 minutes, keeping the oven setting at 475 F for the first 10 minutes of roasting, and then reduce your oven temperature to 375 F (190 C).

After 25 minutes, flip the pork. If the bottom of the pan is dry, add another cup of water. Turn the pan 180 degrees to ensure even roasting. Roast another 15 minutes. Throughout the roasting time, check your char siu often (every 10 minutes) and reduce the oven temperature if it looks like it is burning!

Meanwhile, combine the reserved marinade with the maltose or honey (maltose is very viscous––you can heat it up in the microwave to make it easier to work with) and 1 tablespoon hot water. This will be the sauce you’ll use for basting the pork.
After 40 minutes of total roasting time, baste the pork, flip it, and baste the other side as well. Roast for a final 10 minutes.

By now, the pork has cooked for 50 minutes total. It should be cooked through and caramelized on top. If it’s not caramelized to your liking, you can turn the broiler on for a couple minutes to crisp the outside and add some color/flavor. Be sure not to walk away during this process, since the sweet char siu BBQ sauce can burn if left unattended. You can also use a meat thermometer to check if the internal temperature of the pork has reached 160 degrees F.

Remove from the oven and baste with the last bit of reserved BBQ sauce. Let the meat rest for 10 minutes before slicing, and enjoy!

A favourite dish is Chinese style barbecue pork. It is amazing as a lunch served over steamed rice with a little hot sauce – a perfect way to warm up on a chilly fall day.

While not traditional BBQ ribs, these Chinese pork ribs are just as delicious. Here’s how to make Char Siu ribs at home.

I love the “barbecued” pork and ribs in Chinatown. Unlike traditional Southern American low-and-slow smoke roasted BBQ ribs, there is no smoke flavor, even though there is a pink ring beneath the surface of the meat. How do they do it?

Well, it turns out that Char Siu, even though it sounds like charcoal, is not grilled or smoked. It is roasted in a special oven, usually gas fired. And most of the time it gets its ruddy tone from red food colouring (some chefs use a red bean paste, or beets, but that’s not common).

But it still tastes great. You can buy Char Siu sauce in Chinese specialty stores, but it is thick and gooey. It makes a fine glaze, but it doesn’t make ribs that taste like Chinese restaurant ribs. That’s because you need to marinate the meat first. I’ve worked on this recipe for a while and I think I’ve really nailed the technique for making Chinatown Char Siu Ribs at home in the oven or on the grill. Here’s how to do this dizzyingly delicious favorite.

This marinade is especially good on pork, but I used it on chicken, turkey, and duck with great success.

Ingredients
The Meat
▢1 slab ribs (any cut)
The Marinade
▢¼ cup hoisin sauce
▢¼ cup water
▢2 tablespoons brandy (or dark rum or bourbon)
▢2 tablespoons honey
▢2 tablespoons soy sauce
▢1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
▢1 tablespoon hot sauce such as Tabasco
▢½ tablespoon ground/powdered ginger
▢½ tablespoon ground/powdered onion
▢¼ tablespoon ground/powdered garlic
▢¼ tablespoon five spice powder
▢½ teaspoon red food coloring

Most Chinese restaurants use spareribs chopped into 3-4″ riblets with a cleaver.

If you want, your butcher can make you riblets with her band saw.

If not, you can do them whole. I like baby backs for this recipe because they are meatier on top of the bone.

About the Asian ingredients. There are no substitutes for hoisin sauce, five spice powder, or sesame oil.

They are responsible for most of what we think of as the flavor of Chinese and Asian-inspired food.

Five spice powder is easy to make at home (click the link above for my recipe), but the others are not easily made. Click on the links for more info on these ingredients. If you have trouble finding them in your grocery store, try Amazon.com.

About the hot sauce. If you have an Asian-style chili sauce you can use it, but any old hot sauce will work fine in this marinade since it provides more heat than flavor. The recipe above produces mild heat. Add more if you love pain.

About the food colouring. Food colouring is necessary for the authentic colour.

I am told by readers that you can substitute beet root powder for the red food colouring or fermented bean red curd, but I’ve never tried them.

There is very little used in this recipe and most is discarded with the unused marinade. There are natural food colorings made from achiote and its seeds annato, or cochineal (a.k.a. carmine), an insect.

If you want to leave it out, the food will still be great, but it won’t have the traditional festive color.