Gourmet guide to Chinese barbecue

Chinese barbecue

The best of barbecue

ACT

Tak Kee Roast Inn 10 Woodley St, Dickson, (02) 6257 4939

NSW

Emperor’s Garden BBQ & Noodles 213 Thomas St, Haymarket, (02) 9281 9899

Qld

Golden BBQ 157a Wickham St, Fortitude Valley, (07) 3852 5222

SA

Hong Fat BBQ Restaurant 75 Grote St, Adelaide, (08) 8410 0908

Vic

Pacific Seafood BBQ House Shop 8, 240 Victoria St, Richmond, (03) 9427 8225

WA

Hong Kong BBQ 76 Francis St, Northbridge, (08) 9228 3968

The other stuff

If you’re up for a culinary adventure, offal is plentiful and affordable at most chop-houses. Most offal products offer textural thrills and tend to be very flavourful. For anyone serious about pork, ju dai cheong (pig’s large intestine) and ju yie (crunchy pig’s ears, often shredded and served as a snack with cold beer) are good places to begin. Duck lovers should try the nyap seen (duck tongues) or nyap yick (melt-in-the-mouth duck wings). For a textural delight, jellyfish (hoi jeet) and the curiously orange cuttlefish (muk yiu; the striking hue comes from a dilute masterstock and food colouring) offer a subtle sea-sweetness and bouncy texture that’s hard to beat. They’re perfect as a conversation- and tastebud-starting amuse-bouche in an Asian banquet. The cuttlefish is also excellent sliced paper-thin and mixed with raw fish before being used as a topping for hot congee.

Chinese sausage

Chinese sausage

A preserved product, lup cheong is a sweet cured pork sausage that renders beautiful tasty fat when steamed or sliced thinly and fried. Recipes for it tend to be highly guarded secrets but you can expect them to contain a cut of pork with some attitude (belly, say, or shoulder) and a dose of star anise, cassia bark and Chinese rose-flavoured alcohol. Yuen cheong is a duck or chicken liver sausage; it’s darker and has a concordantly more pronounced flavour. Chop of few of either sausage roughly and throw them into a pot of rice before cooking to make the best steamed rice ever, or slice them thinly to add richness and textural interest to char kway teow or other stir-fried noodles.

Suckling pig

Suckling pig

Suckling pig (yu jue) is prepared like roast pork from a whole baby pig. Select a flat, evenly shaped, amber-coloured piece to ensure crackling, crisp skin and succulent flesh – it’s fantastic served as a canapé. Simply cut it into squares and top them with a dollop of caramelised onion or a little hot English mustard.

Roast pork

Roast pork

Not to be confused with its barbecue brethren, roast pork, or siu yook, is traditionally made from a whole side of pork, with customers picking their favourite cut. A rub with rice wine vinegar, garlic, five-spice and salt followed by overnight drying is the key to the glorious crackly skin. Look for meat that is light in colour (meat that is too dark may have been excessively salted) and skin that is blistered and dry-looking. If you have a choice, buy from the belly or the shoulder – guaranteed to be a juicy experience. Roast pork is fantastic in salads, or, for a quick fix, on white bread with some hoisin sauce. You can also buy a piece of belly with bones in, eat the meat and crackling, then put the bones in a pot of congee and simmer for amazing flavour and a guaranteed hangover cure.

Quail, pigeon and squab

Quail, pigeon and squab

Those little game birds hanging in the window are delicious eating. Some are poached in masterstock, then coated in five-spice salt and deep-fried till crisp, others brushed with maltose and soy sauce before a quick fire in the duck oven. Look for plump birds with a shiny exterior. Strip the meat and put it into lettuce cups with fresh herbs for a killer sang choi bao, or butterfly the birds before reheating them briefly over a hot charcoal barbecue with a honey glaze or spiced salt and lime to serve as finger-licking bar snacks.

Barbecue pork

Barbecue pork

The neon-red sticks of char siu are doubtless the Chinese barbecue product most familiar to the non-Chinese world. The meat, traditionally pork neck or shoulder, is rubbed with white pepper, fermented red tofu, maltose, ground coriander (or sometimes five-spice – it’s usually a closely guarded kitchen secret), red food colouring and mei kuei lu chiew (a rose-flavoured cooking alcohol) and marinated overnight before being roasted and basted with a combination of maltose and red food colouring. Select a piece with a few ripples of fat; it should look shiny and have a few bits of char on the edges, signs the chef has given it a final blast of heat to set the marinade and lock in the flavour. Throw some slices of char siu on rice noodles in chicken stock for a no-fuss dinner, or top a slice of lightly toasted brioche with char siu and slivers of Chinese pickled vegetables for a modern version of the pork bun.

White-cut chicken

White-cut chicken goes perfectly with a dipping sauce of ginger, spring onion and garlic – simply chop equal quantities of garlic, spring onions and ginger very finely, add a good pinch of salt and simmer in hot peanut oil. Some ever-resourceful Chinese use a bit of lard in there as well to give the dipping sauce an assured taste. This sauce is commonly known as chung yao, and most good chop-houses will have it ready to go in little tubs.

For an easy supper, cook some rice in chicken stock, adding pieces of white-cut chicken and some bok choy to the pot for the last 10 minutes. Or coat white-cut chicken in a mixture of flour and five-spice then flash-fry it for some CFC (Chinese fried chicken).

White-cut chicken

White-cut chicken

White-cut chicken (baat cheet gai) is simply chicken poached in water with the usual Chinese suspects – garlic, ginger and spring onion. Sometimes a rub of five-spice, ginger and rice wine is applied to the inside of the bird; otherwise it’s simply salted and then gently poached. Purists like it when you can see the bone shatter when it is cut – a sign of a younger bird. It should look silky and firm and have a fine layer of natural jelly under the skin, an effect the chefs achieve by dunking the still-warm bird into an ice-bath to stop the cooking.

Soy-sauce chicken

Soy-sauce chicken

This chicken is gently poached whole in master stock full of aromatics such as dried tangerine peel, star anise, ginger and soy sauce, then finished with a light soy glaze to give a soft, luscious flavour that brings out the natural sweetness of the chicken. The master stock is kept from batch to batch, reboiled with more aromatics (some stocks in Hong Kong are generations old), which contributes great depth of flavour to a deceptively simple dish. Look for glistening, unbroken skin and a smooth tail; a bumpy rear end means an old and dry chook.

Soy-sauce chicken is particularly excellent with shredded wombok, fresh herbs and roasted peanuts for a crunchy salad, or simmered with egg noodles, chicken stock and fresh chilli for a warming winter soup.

Barbecue duck

While the duck is being chopped Chinese style (into bite-sized pieces through the bone, that is), ask the chef for some duck sauce or nyap jup, the juices that run out of the duck as it’s cut. Mixed through some wok-tossed greens or drizzled over rice, this stuff is culinary gold. Though it’s not strictly traditional in Chinese cooking, roast duck is great used as a filling for rice paper rolls, or thrown into a stir-fry of bitter greens. To be classical, eat it as is with a mountain of fluffy white rice and a little bit of duck sauce drizzled over the top.

Barbecue duck

Roast duck

A favourite of many, roast duck (siu nyap in Cantonese) is the poster dish of the siu mei section. The end product, all glistening and shiny, is the accumulation of intricate techniques involving scalding in hot water, a sugar-vinegar bath, overnight air drying, and roasting in a specialised oven that looks a bit like a tandoor. Vertical roasting of the ducks means the fat renders as the skin crisps, keeping the meat juicy and delicious underneath. Look for medium-large ducks with a lightly puffy exterior – a sign of crisp skin and a layer of fat that isn’t too thick.

Chinese barbecue

For the initiated, Chinese barbecue shops are a wonderful resource. All those gleaming goodies in the window, though, can be a bit hard to take in all at once; even if you’ve nibbled a little barbecue pork here, a little soy chicken there, much of it can still seem bewildering. Armed with this primer, though, we hope you’ll be able to order with impunity and experiment with the expectation of delicious results.

First, some basics. The products you see in barbecue shops in Australia are classified as siu laap, a style of Cantonese cooking most popular in Hong Kong (the northern Chinese school is quite different), and the shops are called siu laap dong. The hanging products (siu mei) are barbecue roasted, while the goods in the trays underneath (lou mei) are traditionally simmered. Almost all require patience, specialised equipment and labour-intensive techniques, so for the most part even hardened Chinese home cooks buy these goods rather than make them at home.