The Sinosphere · Volume 34, The Chilli Jar, the Smoke Room and the Mountain the Tusi Ruled
Larou with garlic stems
Anhua and Xiangxi
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 15 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Anhua and Xiangxi both, in different accents. The pork that survives a winter without refrigeration, then gets treated like the most everyday ingredient in the kitchen.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. 15 minutes, once the larou itself is cured and smoked.
Ingredients
- 300 g larou (home-cured, see Ferment or Preserve Bench, below), sliced thin
- 200 g garlic stems (or leeks), cut into 4cm lengths
- 3 dried chillies, torn
- 2 cloves garlic, sliced
- 1 tbsp Hunan rice vinegar or light rice vinegar
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil
- to taste salt to taste, sparingly, the larou is already salted
Method
- Steam or briefly parboil the larou slices for 5 minutes to soften the cure and render some fat, then drain.
- Heat the oil in a dry, hot wok and stir-fry the larou slices alone first, no other ingredients, until the edges curl and crisp and the fat renders further.
- Push the larou to one side, add the garlic and dried chilli to the rendered fat, and stir-fry until fragrant.
- Add the garlic stems and stir-fry hard over high heat for 2 to 3 minutes, until just tender but still with bite.
- Combine everything, splash in the vinegar right at the end, season with salt sparingly if needed since the larou is already salted, toss briefly and serve immediately.
What a modern chef changes
The smoke, engineered rather than approximated.
Rung 2
Method
- Cure the pork belly at roughly 3 to 3.5% salt by weight, swapping the Sichuan version's peppercorn-heavy cure for extra chilli, garlic and ginger to keep the profile Hunanese, for about a week in the fridge, then air-dry uncovered on a rack for a day to form a pellicle.
- Fit a cold-smoke generator into the Big Green Egg, loaded with oak dust, adding dried citrus peel and a handful of dry green tea leaves at intervals rather than all at once, layering the aromatics the way Xiangxi sources describe for their own cypress-finished smoke. Run long: several 8 to 10 hour sessions over 2 to 3 days, closer to the reported Hunan duration than a single short Western cold smoke, while accepting honestly that true rice-hull smoke cannot be replicated with UK-available fuel.
- Mature the finished larou for at least a month, ideally three, hung in a cool, dry space, before it is ever cooked, exactly as the tradition demands; do not rush a home-cured larou to the pan the week it comes off the smoker.