I told you that I love cooking and I’d love to consider myself a good cook. To prove that I wasn’t bluffing, I’ll teach you how to cook one ofmy best favorite dish—the 3D meat cube.
I named the dish myself. I call it 3D because first of all,the title could be very long if I name it in the normal way. Plus, It’s got all the appealing colors in—red, green, yellow, and brown; and it tastes savory, spicy, sour and sweet at the same time, but in different dimensions!
I first tried this dish in a decent Chinese restaurant in Bangkok. Interestingly enough, the chef was a Chinese-born American who married a Thai-born Chinese lady who runs the restaurant. The food was absolutely a thumb-up. You can actually smell the tangy aroma before it was served on the table. I tried to replicate the dish when I came back, and I’ve made some changes on the recipe to meet up my standard.
Preparation
To cook this food, we need two fine pieces of pork loin. You can get rid of the thin layer of fat on the meat if you care much about calories. Roughly dice the meat into bite-size cubes.
Put the meat cubes into a bowl for seasoning, in with a splash ofrice wine, two tablespoons of light soy sauce, a teaspoon of honey or two, apinch of sugar, a pinch of Chinese Five-spice Powder (ground Star-anise, fennel, clove, cinnamon and Sichuan peppercorn), and finally a teacup of pineapple juice. Take the yolk form two eggs and add it into the bowl, in witha tablespoon of corn flour. This helps to seal the juice inside the meat. Now give it a good mix and then you can just leave it to marinate while you prepare other ingredients.
Grate about a handful of ginger and garlic, finely dice some red pepper and onion, thinly slice some spring onion and yellow pepper strips, and roughly grind some dry-roasted peanuts or cashew nuts. When all these areready, we are good to go.
The cooking
Heat the work, add in some oil, and deep fry the meat cubes. If the oil is hot enough, it should just cook the outside, crisp it up, so the oil wouldn’t seep in. lift the meat out as soon as the color turns to light brown. Drain it on some kitchen paper and let the heat cook the inside.
Set the oil aside but spare a little for the final stir-fry process.While the work is still hot, add in the ginger, garlic, onion and red pepper and get them to release all the fragrance. Then add in the ground peanut, a small handful of cumin, a pinch of salt, a sprinkle of dry chili flake, and a tablespoon of rice wine. Add the deep-fried meat cubes back to the work, along with the yellow pepper and spring onion strips. Stir-fry forabout a minute, Finally, a drizzle of sesame oil before you serve it up on a dish.
The taste
All the spices make it incredibly zesty and fragrant, and the cumin really adds zing to the dish. It tastes crispy, savory, smoky, and bit of spicy on the outside, yet sour and sweet and tender and succulent from the inside. The spring onionand yellow pepper not only add gorgeous colors to the dish but also a crunchy mouthfeel. You can experience layers upon layers of different texture and flavor andaroma within one bite. It’s absolutely mouth-watering, lip-smacking, and finger-licking good!
Some other vocabulary about cooking you might want to know
Chop/ slice/ dice/ score/ shred/ mince
marinate/ mix/ blend
Steam
boil/ stew/ simmer
pan-fry/ Stir-fry/ deep-fry
braise
roast/ broil/ grill