Char Siu (Cantonese BBQ Pork) · Daddy Lau

Name: Char Siu (Cantonese BBQ Pork) · Daddy Lau
Total time: 1 h 20 min
Yield: 6
Cuisine: Cantonese
Ingredients: 2 lb (900 g) Pork shoulder; 1 tbsp Garlic salt; 4 tbsp Brown sugar; 2 tbsp Oyster sauce; 2 tbsp Light soy sauce; 1 tbsp Hoisin sauce; 2 tbsp Red wine; 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine; 1 cube Red fermented bean curd; 1 tsp Five spice powder; 2 tbsp Honey; 2 tsp Water; 0.25 tsp Red food colouring

Pork shoulder forked all over, steeped overnight in a marinade built on red fermented bean curd and five spice, then roasted hot and basted four times — the last two with honey — until the edges go lacquered and dark.

Fonte

Receita de Chung Sun Lau (Daddy Lau) · 👨‍🍳 Chef · Cantonese chef of 50+ years; his family publish his recipes in full at Made With Lau

Os nomes de cozinheiros e criadores aparecem apenas como crédito da fonte. A More Recipes Please é independente e não é afiliada, endossada nem patrocinada por eles.

Made With Lau (madewithlau.com) — Published in full, free, on the Lau family's own site as 'The Char Siu Pork My Dad's Made 100,000 Times'. Chung Lau is a Cantonese chef of over 50 years. What distinguishes his home version is that it is built for a domestic oven rather than a hanging roast box: a rack over a foil pan with water in the bottom, and a fixed four-baste schedule — marinade at 15 and 30 minutes, then honey at 40, then a 450°F blast for the last 5. His own chef's note caps the marinade at 24 hours and calls for an hour at room temperature before roasting. The amounts, yield and timings above are theirs, taken from the structured recipe data on the page; the marinating time sits outside their stated 80-minute total.

Cozinheiro: Chung Sun Lau (Daddy Lau)

Veja como se faz · 2 vídeos

Chung Sun Lau (Daddy Lau)Celine Leung

⏱ 80 min🍽 6 porções🔥 420 kcal🇨🇳 China

Sem lactoseSem oleaginosas

Modo de preparo

Slice the 2 lb of pork shoulder into pieces about 1 inch (2.5 cm) thick, keeping the thickness as even as you can.
💡 Even thickness matters more than neat shapes. The roasting schedule is fixed, so a thin piece next to a thick one means one is jerky by the time the other is cooked.
Poke each side of every piece repeatedly with a fork.
💡 This is not optional busywork. Pork shoulder is dense, and the fork holes are the only route the marinade has into the middle of the meat — unpoked pork ends up seasoned on the outside and bland within.
Make the marinade: combine the garlic salt, brown sugar, oyster sauce, light soy sauce, hoisin, red wine, Shaoxing wine, the cube of red fermented bean curd and the five spice powder in a bowl. Mash the bean curd cube against the side and mix until the sauce is smooth. Stir in the red food colouring now if you want the classic colour.
Put the pork in a zip-top bag, pour in the marinade, and massage it into the meat for a full 2 minutes. Seal it and refrigerate for 6–8 hours, or overnight.
💡 Chef's note from the Laus: do not go past 24 hours. The salt and wine keep working, and beyond a day the texture starts breaking down instead of improving.
Take the pork out of the fridge and let it sit at room temperature for 1 hour before it goes anywhere near the oven.
💡 Fridge-cold pork hitting a 425°F oven cooks from the outside in and stays raw at the centre on a fixed timer. The hour on the counter is what makes the schedule below actually work.
Preheat the oven to 425°F (218°C).
Line a baking pan with foil and set a rack on top. Arrange the pork on the rack, then pour 1–2 tbsp of water into the bottom of the pan. Slide it into the oven.
💡 The water in the pan is there to stop the sugary drips from burning to smoke on the hot foil. The rack keeps the pork up out of them so it roasts instead of stewing.
Roast for 15 minutes, then pull the pan out and baste the pork with the leftover marinade.
Roast for another 15 minutes, then baste with the marinade a second time.
Mix the 2 tbsp of honey with the 2 tsp of water to loosen it. Roast the pork another 10 minutes, then baste it with the diluted honey.
💡 The honey only shows up in the last two bastes, and that ordering is deliberate: put it on at the start and it would be black long before the pork was cooked.
Turn the oven up to 450°F (232°C), roast for a final 5 minutes, and give it one last baste of honey.
💡 Stay at the oven door for these five minutes. This is where the char in char siu happens, and it is also the exact window where honey goes from lacquered to acrid.
Let the char siu cool for 5 minutes before you cut it, then slice and serve — over rice, in noodles, or straight off the board.
💡 Five minutes is short but real. Cut it straight from the oven and the juices run out onto the board instead of staying in the meat.

💡 Dicas

Beginner's mistake: reading the marinating time as part of the 80 minutes. It is not — the Laus' timings cover prep and cooking only. This is a dish you start the night before, full stop.
Red fermented bean curd (南乳) is the one thing worth a trip to a Chinese grocer. It is not the same as the white fermented tofu, and without it you get roast pork with hoisin on it rather than char siu. A jar keeps for months in the fridge.
Skip the food colouring without a second thought. The Laus themselves mark it optional — it is doing nothing but reproducing the pillar-box red of a Cantonese roast-meat window. Your char siu will be a handsome mahogany instead.
No Shaoxing wine? Dry sherry is the standard stand-in and behaves almost identically here. The 2 tbsp of red wine in the list is separate and doing a different job — do not merge the two.
Pork shoulder is the cut for a reason: it has enough intramuscular fat to survive a 425°F oven. Loin or tenderloin will be dry and stringy no matter how carefully you baste.