Sunday, July 29, 2007

Cooking: Char Sui Sow & Luau Partay

I told Tigerfish that I'd make her char sui sow recipe for poker, but got lazy and made something else instead. I was invited to Tina & Dave's (a couple ex coworkers from a while back) Luau party yesterday and I had an itch to do something productive and cook. So, what better recipe to try out than Tigerfish's char sui sows right?

So here's what I started out with. Oyster sauce, sugar and pepper in one bowl. Corn starch and water in the other. To make things easier on myself, I chopped up store bought char sui, onion and garlic. My hand started to hurt from chopping up the meat, but you gotta start from somewhere to get chef muscles right?

Tigerfish's recipe says to throw everything in a pan to saute and incorporate all the ingrediants, but I decided to saute the onions first and then add the garlic and char sui.

After all the ingrediants are mixed well together, I added the cornstarch and let the mixture thicken up. Off the heat it goes to cool down.

Now the hard part. I let the puff pastry sheets (I used 3) thaw out so I could cut them up into squares. Then you wrap your cooled mixture in the puff pastry and seal the ends. The puff pastry was a little hard to work with since it was so finicky on a warm day. It was getting mushy, but not to the point where I couldn't make it work. Once they meat mixture is wrapped, I brushed it with an egg wash and poked holes on the tops. Into a 395 degree oven for 22 minutes.

Fresh outta the oven!

They looked kinda plain to me so I decided to drizzle the tops with honey and sprinkle black and white sesame seeds, and green onions on top for garnish. How do they look? Well, how did they taste? I really liked them although the meat on the inside was slightly salty. I had added the soy sauce stuff that comes with the char sui and that probably wasn't the best idea. But still pretty good.

I relaxed after baking and then decided to hit the road and join the party. I was really pleased that everyone enjoyed my "Chinese Baklava". They were gone within an hour or so! Here are some pictures from the party. Oh and in a couple of the pictures, they were playing tug of war with some Muscat because they couldn't get the cork out. Funny stuff...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I buttered the char siew sou while baking to make it more fragrant.

I like the idea of brushing some honey on the char siew sou (savory item). :D

JadedOne said...

Heh yah I think I'll try butter next time I make them.

The only reason why I used honey was so the sesame seeds would stick hehe. But people seemed to enjoy the savory sweet flavor :)