Hakka steamed pork belly and taro, fried then stacked in alternating slices and steamed for hours before being turned out upside down
Origin: Guangzhou & the Pearl River Delta
From the journey of Taro.
Kòu means to invert, and the name describes the last movement of the cooking rather than the ingredients. Slices of pork belly and slices of taro are packed alternately, curved side down, into a deep bowl, steamed for two or three hours, and then covered with a plate and turned over, so that what was the bottom of the bowl becomes a neat domed stack on the dish. It is a Hakka banquet dish and it appears at the New Year, at weddings, and at the tables where a family is making an effort. The two ingredients are chosen because each fixes the other's fault. Pork belly steamed for three hours renders a great deal of fat, which has to go somewhere; taro is dry, floury, and absorbent, and it takes up that fat and becomes silky. In exchange the taro gives back its starchiness, so the pork loses the greasiness that would otherwise make a slice of three-hour belly hard to eat. Neither works nearly as well alone, and the pairing is old enough that Cantonese cooks treat it as self-evident. Both are fried before they are stacked, and this is the step most often skipped and most worth keeping. The pork is boiled, pricked, rubbed with dark soy, and fried skin down until the skin blisters; the taro is fried until its cut faces are golden and sealed. Without that seal the taro disintegrates over three hours of steam and the dish becomes a bowl of scented mash. The seasoning is the southern Chinese trio of fermented bean curd, five spice, and Shaoxing wine, and the red fermented bean curd version gives the mahogany colour that most people picture when the dish is named.
Frying the taro before it is stacked is the technical heart of this dish and the step that separates a clean stack from a bowl of scented mash; the seal it forms is what lets the slices survive three hours of steam. Choose a large dense taro corm rather than small eddoes, since you need slices that will match the pork. Wear gloves when peeling raw taro, as the sap causes intense itching. Red fermented bean curd gives both the colour and a good deal of the savour and is sold in jars by any Chinese grocer; the white kind works but produces a paler and milder dish. The whole thing can be assembled and steamed a day ahead and re-steamed for thirty minutes, which is what most restaurants do.
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