Pork with green beans and shiokombu
My favourite way to cook green beans is actually to oil-blanch them until wrinkled and soft, before stir-frying. Oil-blanching is a popular technique in Chinese cooking which is essentially quickly frying in very hot oil. It's slightly different from deep-frying or shallow frying and often done by stirring the ingredients through hot oil in a wok.
In this case I've cooked the green beans with pork belly, oyster sauce and a bit of shiokombu, but they're also popular in Sichuanese cuisine stir-fried with pork mince, chilli and Sichuan peppercorns (干煸四季豆), or pork mince and Chinese olives.
Shiokombu is a dried, seasoned kombu (kelp) available from Japanese grocers. In Japanese cuisine it's most often used as a seasoning for rice, but its strong umami taste is very versatile. Here I've used it to sprinkle on top of a stir-fried dish together with aonori (dried sea lettuce).
Cooking time
<30min
Ingredients
- 300 g pork belly, skin and bones removed, cut into 2 cm pieces
- ¾ cup vegetable oil
- 400 g green beans, stems picked
- 4 cloves garlic, sliced
- 1 tbsp oyster sauce
- 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
- ½ tsp sugar
- 1 tsp shiokombu, finely chopped, plus extra to serve
- a little aonori, to serve
- Meat marinade
- 1 tsp cornflour
- 1 tsp soy sauce
- 1 tsp Shaoxing wine
- a pinch of salt
- 1 tsp sesame oil
Method
- Combine the pork with the marinade ingredients. Cut the green beans into 5 cm pieces. Heat a wok over high heat and add the oil. Fry the green beans in the oil for around 5-10 minutes, until the beans appear dry and wrinkled. Remove the beans from the wok with a slotted spoon or tongs. Drain the oil from the wok leaving about 2 tbsp for frying the pork and allow the oil to heat until very hot.
- Add the pork to the hot wok and fry without stirring until well-browned on one side. Add the garlic and toss the wok for about 2 minutes until the garlic is lightly browned. Return the beans to the wok and add the oyster sauce, Shaoxing wine, sugar and shiokombu and toss to combine. Transfer to a serving plate and scatter with a little more shiokombu and some aonori.
