What I Ate For Dinner

These steamed pork buns are the least work for the most reward of damn near anything I can remember cooking. Yeah, the pork takes two hours; but the slab I bagged today cost less than 4 bucks at 1.79/# and once you've got 'er in the oven, you only have to flip it once before yankin' it out. And from there, the assembly requires but the cognitive capacities of a poorly trained chimp, and the end product costs only a fraction of what that chimp could make hawkin' these things on any street corner in the world. They're that good, that easy and that cheap. Big ups to the inimitable stud David Chang for including this recipe in his Momofuku (pg. 80).

Start with skinless pork belly--I went with a two-pounder today, but if you've got friends coming over, you might want to bump that up. Pork belly, as you may have guessed, is fatty, greasy and heavy (stereotypical adjective most often used to describe it: "unctuous"), so you won't need a hell of a lot of it per bun. Unless you wanna Double Down. Give it a good rubbin' with a mix of equal parts brown sugar and kosher salt. Chang says to let it rest at this point in the 'fridge for six to twenty-four hours, but I always skip that step. But then again, he's the one with all the James Beard Awards.

Throw it in a 400 degree oven, fatty side up, and roast for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on which end of the two-to-three-pound spectrum your slab falls on. Fat will be rollin' out of the guy, which if you reserve, you could use. Or if pork fat scares you, you can throw it out. Yer call.

Flip it on over to the other side after 45-60 minutes, and kill the heat to only around 250. You could baste the beast at this point, if you're industrious. Give it another hour.

While the pork is finishing up, give yourself fifteen minutes to knock out what Chang calls "quick pickled" vegetables. I'm not sure what sense of pickling this is, but the product is super good. Start with some chopped veggies--carrots, cucumbers, daicon, jicama, you name it--and add one part salt to three parts sugar. Coat the veggies up real good. Optionally, you could also add a bit of lime juice. Let 'em hang out in the 'fridge for ten or twenty minutes. Taste them. If they suck, wash off the spices and try again, keeping in mind why they sucked the first time.

Now the buns. You can make 'em yourself. If you have a lot of space and time. Chang has the recipe on page 81. If you have a life, though, you might just want to get some either fresh from a Chinese bakery (best option), or frozen from whatever grocer has 'em in your postal code (still quite a good option). The buns you're lookin' for are like soft, Michelin-man taco shells.

If you have a steamer, steam 'em. If you don't, boil water in a big pot and put a colander on top to hold the buns over the steam. Fresh ones will take moments; frozen ones will take two or three minutes.

Now delicious assembly: start with a bun, slather hoisin sauce on one side, plunk down a few pseudo-pickled veggies, a slice or two of the pork belly (cut 'em about a half inch thick and two inches long), garnish with chopped scallion and siracha.