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Passport & Plate - Cantonese Congee with Minced Pork & Preserved Egg

Hong Kong | Wednesday, March 4, 2015 | 3 photos

Ingredients
200 grams of pork mince
½ fresh minced ginger
1 tsp Shaoxing wine
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp sugar
½ tsp soy sauce
1/5 tsps cornflour
2 tsps canola oil
2 spring onions, chopped diagonally
Preserved egg (optional)

150 grams of Thai fragrant rice, medium grain
2 tsp cooking oil
½ tsp salt

 

How to prepare this recipe
In a bowl, combine pork mince, ginger, Shaoxing wine, salt, sugar, soy sauce, cornflour and oil. Mix well and set aside in the fridge.
Rinse the rice by adding water, rubbing the grains with your hands and then draining. Repeat until the water is clear, then drain. Mix it with the salt and oil and set aside for 30 minutes. Rinse and drain.
Bring 2.5 litres of water to the boil in a thick-bottomed pan over a high flame. Add the rice, return to a boil, partially cover the pan and simmer gently for about an hour and a half, stirring occasionally. The grains should be burst completely and melted into the water to form a porridge like consistency by the end of cooking.
Add the pork mixture to the rice, breaking down the meat with a spoon and simmer with the lid off until the pork is cooked, approximately 5-10 minutes.
Stir the chopped up preserved egg through the rice, top with spring onions and serve.

 

The story behind this recipe
My nana was a rubbish cook. It always astounds me to hear blissful tales of comparison: "Oh, this is wonderful - just like my grandmother used to make." Or to hear the heart-string tugging memories time after time of Masterchef contestants and bloggers..."My first memories of food are sitting on the kitchen counter watching my nan/gran/Nona. Everything I learned, I learned from her." Blah blah. Really? REALLY?!
At first I thought it was down to genetics - maybe if I had an Italian Nona who lovingly rolled floury gnocchi while stirring an aromatic and bubbly sauce...or an exotic Asian grandma who could chop vegies faster than a woodchipper and produce dumplings with pastry so thin they looked like still forming sea creatures. But no, it wasn't just my lack of genetic exoticism...the baking tins of friends' also colonial-stock grandmothers were replete with all manner of delectable temptations; the sorts of treats to be coveted under cloak of darkness even after an afternoon's feasting.
My nana didn't even have a baking tin. Her idea of cooking was boiling everything - the meat, the spuds, the greens - for nearly the exact same time as each other. Condiments - white bread (thin, sandwich slice, generic supermarket stuff) and margarine. Salt and pepper would be on the table but there comes a point at which they can't resuscitate a thing. Corned beef day was the worst for me. Not only did everything end up with the texture of baby food but the entire house also stank of it from the hours of extreme boiling. Her house was not somewhere I visited for comfort food.
So why congee? All cultures have their comfort foods and whenever feeling low, sick or anything less than 100% in any of the Asian countries we’ve visited, rice porridge is the healer. It’s a soothing hug in a bowl and transports me back to Hong Kong whenever I make it. Congee is the chicken soup of the East and the most grandmotherly recipe I could think of.