Honey-Glazed Char Siu 蜜汁叉烧

Honey-Glazed Char Siu (蜜汁叉烧) is Cantonese roast pork coated in a sweet red sauce, widely eaten in Guangdong and Hong Kong, where it is served on its own, over rice or inside dim sum.

How it is made

Char siu was traditionally roasted on a fork over a fire, which is what the name describes; small home ovens and halogen ovens now give a comparable result. Before roasting, the pork is brushed with red char siu sauce, and this is what gives the finished meat its brick-red colour. The sauce is based on light soy sauce, minced garlic, maltose, fermented red bean curd (南乳), five-spice powder and rice wine.

Cooks usually use pork shoulder, known in Cantonese as mui tau (梅頭), and prize pieces with an even balance of fat and lean, called "bun fei sau" (半肥瘦, half fat, half lean). Well-made char siu is tender and juicy, bright in colour and strongly aromatic. Some kitchens now use Spanish black pork instead of Chinese breeds for a looser, softer texture, and some chefs pour rose-scented liquor (玫瑰露) over the meat and flame it once more before it goes to the table so that it carries the smell of the spirit.

How it is eaten

It is served as a main dish, or sliced over white rice as char siu rice (叉燒飯). Cantonese restaurants use it as the filling of three dim sum: char siu bao (叉燒包), baked char siu pastries (叉燒酥) and char siu rice-noodle rolls (叉燒腸粉). It also goes into Yangzhou fried rice and Singapore-style fried rice noodles (星洲炒米粉).

In Cantonese-speaking areas, parents often scold their children with the saying that giving birth to a lump of char siu would have been better than giving birth to them. In the March 2016 revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, char siu was one of twelve terms added together, among them dai pai dong (大排檔) and milk tea.