Char Siew Sou (叉烧酥)

Making Char Siew Sou has always been a ‘big affair’. In fact, making any kind of puff pastry is too time consuming for me. For the western version, it takes even longer given the time required to refrigerate in between folds.

The Chinese version of the puff pastry takes time too! But probably half. It has a completely different texture and is crumblier than the western puff pastry, these pastries also melt in your mouth unlike the frozen western ones. You cannot really replace Chinese puff pastries with the western version and vice versa.

Besides the skin, the filing in the dessert is of particular interest. It is pork used as a sweet. Asians have been cooking our meat sweet for centuries: sweet sausages, bakwa (sweet BBQ pork), nonya dumplings, Japanese sweet curries etc etc. This snack is just another good example of using meat as a dessert. It is therefore fascinating for me to watch how fascinated the westerners are when they start to caramelize their bacons with sugar for decorations in recent years. It just goes to show how much must be buried in the culinary worlds of ancient civilizations like Greece, Roman, Jew and Egyptian.

While my kids grew up with these, I only heard about char siew sou after I have started working. They were wonderful treats and I would go to Carlton hotel and buy them by the dozens for my kids in the 1990s. These were rare then, and only available in good restaurants.

Since the early 2000s, people are selling these everywhere including hawker centers and simpler restaurants, and the quality of these treats has gone up overall. We need not go to a specialist shop just to buy them anymore.

Having said that, nothing beats home made char siew sou. They are crumbly and delicious, always in the right texture and sweetness.

Marinate the pork for about an hour or two.

Thicker slices taste better in the pastry

Make the sweet sauce to go with the char siew

This is after a layer of egg white + 1/2 egg yolk wash.

This is it ready to be baked.

I made my own char siew as well, and everything from scratch.  The recipe is from a famous Hong Kong chef and it is really wonderful. Even for someone who has not baked an Oriental puff pastry for 27 years, I still managed to do it. So you can try too!

It is a skill that is almost lost, and I certainly hope to revive that in some of the younger generation.

It is always great to understand multiple languages. My great-grandfather and grandfather were from Kuilin (桂林，广西), a part of Canton, so I happen to speak and read fluent Cantonese, one of three Chinese dialects I picked up from young. So here’s a video of a Hongkong chef showing us how to do it right.