A delicious rillettes recipe inspired by the flavors of Northern China
Today, I’m sharing a truly original recipe. To me, it’s one of the best examples of Chinese-French culinary fusion… with a little Mexican influence too, but I’ll get to that later in the article.
Chinese… rillettes?
That’s right! First of all, it’s essential to understand what rillettes are. At its core, this homemade charcuterie is simply meat and salt, slowly cooked in animal fat over low heat for a few hours.
Once you understand that, it becomes very easy to adapt the recipe to your own taste by changing the meat (for example, I’ve already made veal rillettes, chicken rillettes, …) or the spices. That’s where I come in. As part of the Spring of Rillettes, I was asked to create a recipe for Asian-inspired rillettes. Mission accomplished, and it’s absolutely delicious.
Lately, I’ve been eating a lot of northern Chinese cuisine—biang biang noodles, dan dan noodles, cumin beef, ..—and that’s the cooking that inspired this recipe.
The key ingredients in Asian-style rillettes
Here, spring onions and garlic gently confit into the meat, bringing a generous dose of umami. Coriander seeds add an intense, fresh aroma, and finally the famous Sichuan peppercorns give everything a subtle lift. But don’t worry, you can barely taste the heat.
How to serve Asian-style rillettes
Two ways:
Classic: Chilled, on good bread
Warm: I call it “Mexican-style”: on a tortilla with a little mango sauce, some corn, and thinly sliced shallot. It’s absolutely delicious.
Ingredients
- 1 kg of pork
- 10 g of salt
- 2 tablespoons of ground cumin
- 1 tablespoon of ground Sichuan peppercorns
- 2 tablespoons of ground coriander seeds
- 4 cloves of garlic peeled and crushed
- 4 stalks of spring onions cut into sections
- 10 g of dashi powder
- 400 g of lard or other animal fat (beef, duck, goose, etc.)
- 1 cup of water start with half, then check that once the fat has melted, all the meat is covered
Instructions
- Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan over low heat (3 out of 10)
- Cook for 4 to 5 hours without a lid
- Turn off the heat
- Remove the meat and shred it into a large mixing bowl
- Look at the liquid in the saucepan: you will see two layers. The top layer is fat, while the dark liquid at the bottom is the concentrated cooking juices. Taste them if you like; they are intensely flavorful, and you will want to keep them.
- Using a ladle, transfer as much of the surface fat as possible to a separate bowl, leaving as much of the cooking juices as you can in the saucepan
- It's fine if a little fat remains. Pour the entire contents of the saucepan into the bowl with the shredded pork and mix well. Your rillette mixture is ready!
- Fill the jars: prepare jam jars or other airtight containers, then alternate two tablespoons of rillette mixture with one tablespoon of pure fat (the fat used for cooking that you set aside earlier) until each jar is full. Make sure to finish with a spoonful of fat.
- Seal tightly and refrigerate for up to 2 weeks, unless you know how to sterilize jars properly
