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Problem in a Chinese Recipe?

1K views 7 replies 6 participants last post by  ed buchanan 
#1 ·
I made a dish called Hong Shao Rou (red cooked pork), and the flavours were good, but the sauce in the bottom was extremely oily and fatty, all the red coloured sauce was completely submerged in the bottom of the oily bleh. Is this normal? Is there a way to prevent it?
 
#6 ·
When I cook it I remove the pork from the sauce, strain out the chunks of star anise and such and use a fat separator as PHatch mentions, then may or may not reduce the sauce further.


I usually get some pretty good gelatin with the sauce the next day.
 
#7 ·
Other degreasing techniques:

DIY fat separator with a sturdy plastic bag:

.

You'd want to work with a liquid that had cooled from boiling a bit so the seams of the bag don't fail is my only caveat. I'd probably just cut a small hole in the corner with kitchen scissors myself. I think this is a pretty slick idea if you don't have a fat separator.

Spoon it off. The hassle here is that this easiest with something tall and narrow to concentrate the fat in a thick spoonable layer. But you want low sidewalls to easily get the spoon in and maneuver it.

Blot it off the surface with paper towels. When you get to a certain point however, you start absorbing more of the desirable liquid than the fat.

Similar to the paper towel, large leafs of cabbage or iceberg lettuce will hold on to grease better than it does the other liquid. It reaches a point where it stops being effective towards the later part of degreasing though.

Chill, remove the hardened fat from the top. This is a great technique but it takes time which is often in short supply.

Keep a plastic bottle of frozen water in your refrigerator. Run it around the surface of your liquid slowly. The fat will congeal and stick to the bottle. Wipe the bottle down and repeat. I've seen similar techniques with a plastic bag filled with ice. You might need multiple bottles depending on the quantity you're working with. Still a kludge of a technique and also reaches a point of diminishing returns.
 
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