The Sinosphere · Volume 26, The Hung Oven, the Clear Stock and a Banquet That Never Quite Existed
Nine-Turn Braised Intestines
Shandong (Jinan)
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
One of the better-documented origin stories in this chapter: first made at Jiuhualou in Jinan in the early Guangxu reign, originally called plain "红烧大肠." The restaurant's owner, surnamed Du, had a personal fondness for the character 九, nine, and literati diners, pleasing him while praising the dish's meticulous multi-stage cooking, likened it to Daoist "nine-refinement alchemy" and renamed it 九转大肠.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 as part of a banquet. About 1.5 hours.
Ingredients
- 500g pork intestine, cleaned
- as needed oil, for frying
- 60g sugar, for the caramel base
- to taste vinegar, Shaoxing wine, salt, oyster sauce, white pepper
Method
- Thread the intestine's narrow end back inside the wide end, turning it two to three times so the tube layers over itself, pinning with toothpicks to hold the shape.
- Blanch from cold water, then boil until cooked through.
- Remove the toothpicks and cut into segments roughly 2.5cm long.
- Fry at roughly 70% oil temperature until golden-red.
- In a separate pan, cook sugar to a jujube-red caramel, adding a little vinegar and Shaoxing wine directly into the caramel step to burn off the offal's gaminess as it vapours off.
- Return the fried intestine to the caramel and braise around 10 minutes with vinegar, wine, salt, oyster sauce and white pepper, until the dish carries all five basic tastes, sour, sweet, bitter, salty and pungent, at once.
What a modern chef changes
A dehydrator-assisted pre-dry for a crisper fry, and a precisely timed caramel. Rung 4's reduction discipline.
Rung 4
Method
- Dehydrate the boiled intestine briefly before frying to remove surface moisture, giving a crisper, less spattering fry than frying straight from the boiling water.
- Cook the caramel to a measured colour using a probe thermometer rather than judging by eye, since the jujube-red target is a real, repeatable colour temperature a thermometer can hit consistently.
- Reduce the final braise slightly further than tradition asks, tightening the sauce to cling to each segment rather than pool in the dish, a small, checkable refinement of the same five-taste discipline.