The Sinosphere · Volume 27, The Iron Pot, the Frozen Pear and the Railway’s Own Sausage
Tiedun
Liaoning and Jilin
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Tiedun is one fire and one pot doing two dishes at once, Manchu hunting-era field cooking meeting a Shandong and Hebei settler's stewing habit.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 to 6. About 1 hour.
Ingredients
- 600 g pork belly or a mixed freshwater fish (carp, catfish or crucian carp work), cut into pieces
- 300 g firm tofu, cubed
- 100 g wide dried vermicelli, soaked
- 1 spring onion, 5 slices ginger, 3 cloves garlic, 10 g each light and dark soy sauce, sugar to taste scallion, ginger, garlic, light and dark soy sauce, a little sugar
- 250 g fine cornmeal
- 60 g plain wheat flour
- about 220 ml, a pinch of salt warm water, a pinch of salt
- 800 ml good stock or water
Method
- Brown the pork or fish in a large, heavy pot with the scallion, ginger and garlic, then add the soy sauces, sugar and stock.
- Bring to a simmer, add the tofu, and let the stew cook gently, uncovered, for about 30 minutes.
- While the stew cooks, mix the cornmeal, flour, salt and warm water into a firm, workable dough.
- Shape the dough into flattened discs and press them firmly onto the inner wall of the pot, above the liquid line, spaced evenly around the rim.
- Cover and continue cooking a further 15 to 20 minutes, until the stew is done and the cornbread discs are set and lightly browned where they meet the hot pot wall.
- Add the soaked vermicelli to the stew for the final few minutes, then serve the stew and the peeled-off cornbread together.
What a modern chef changes
A Big Green Egg as the iron pot, with the dual heat zones properly measured.
Rung 3, applied directly to the reader's own kit.
Method
- Use a heavy cast-iron Dutch oven inside the Big Green Egg, set up for indirect heat, so the pot wall itself runs hot enough to bake the cornbread discs while the egg's ambient heat holds the stew at a gentle simmer, the closest a British kitchen gets to an open-fire iron pot's own uneven, two-zone heat.
- Dry the cornbread dough's surface briefly before pressing it onto the wall, a short pass under a fan or in a low dehydrator, for better initial adhesion.
- Monitor the pot wall temperature with a probe thermometer rather than judging by eye, since the whole technique depends on the wall running hot enough to bake, not merely steam, the bread.