Twice Cooked, Ten Times The Flavor

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

There is nothing worse than a piece of over-cooked food. Five minutes too long in the oven and pork roast goes from juicy to as dry as chewing on cotton balls. Give a shelled shrimp just thirty seconds too long in the pan and all the moisture direct from the sea evaporates into thin air and all you are left with a is a rubbery pink comma.

It is a wonder then that some favorite cooking techniques demand heat in one form or another not once, but twice. How, you might want to know, does one do that, cook something multiple times without cooking it into oblivion?

The reason and the key is to cook once for doneness, and a second time for texture and flavor.

Take the French fry for instance. You might have noticed some restaurants touting “twice cooked” fries. This was once a secret process known only to those cognoscenti who recognized the fluffy interior and perfectly browned exterior of a potato that had hit a fryer once at a medium temperature, cooled, and then finished up browning at a higher temperature. Cook the potato only at the higher temperature and you risked browning without cooking through. Fry only at the lower temp and the potato would be done but not crisp. Combine the techniques into a two-step process and you have fried potato perfection.

While a deep fryer and a reliable thermometer might be out of the realm of possibility for the average home cook, the same idea can be applied with some meat simply and easily in most kitchens.

Twice cooked pork for instance is a staple on Sichuan restaurant menus. Typically a cut of pork belly is boiled in a pot of salted water seasoned with fresh ginger for about an hour, till tender. It is then sliced thinly tossed in work with traditional seasoning like oyster sauce or black bean paste.

Belly is delicious but still not a common find at most super markets. However, pork loin and pork tenderloin are near ubiquitous. And given that both of these cuts have been bred so lean these days as to remove nearly all flavor, I thought the double cook thing might do it a kindness by adding back in some fat.

To make this dish at home, I started with some nice pork sirloins from naturally raised, free-range pigs, but any old pork loin would have worked. From there I built a potent broth of water, soy, wine, star anise, leeks, garlic, coriander seeds, and fresh ginger. The loin cuts do not need as long to cook as the belly, after 20 minutes of slow simmering they were just done. I let the meat cool slightly in the broth with the heat off and removed it to a cutting board until it was easy to handle.

Sichuan dishes typically keep the vegetable accoutrements minimal, not much more than cabbage. But I wanted this to be a complete and colorful one-dish meal. To that end I sautéed green onions, garlic, ginger, red pepper, and sugar snap peas. While the veg was working I gave the pork a quick rub of five spice powder mixed with a bit of brown sugar and sliced it into thin, bite sized strips. Once the veg was tender but still crisp I removed it from the wok and set it aside. I added more oil and cranked the heat. The pork hit the pan with a sizzle. A minute or two of tossing later, the meat was crispy and a lovely shade of caramel from the sugar.

Veg back with the meat, I gave the whole mixture a shot of oyster sauce and a heaping spoonful of garlic chili paste. With that and a side of brown rice dinner was served. Twice cooked might have been double the work but the result was ten times the flavor.

Note: Reserve the cooking broth for a future dinner. When thinned out with chicken stock it makes a great base for noodle soup.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 1 1/2 pound pork loin, cut in two even sized pieces
• salt and pepper
• 6 tablespoons low sodium soy sauce
• 1/4 cup white wine
• 1 leek, white part only
• 1 piece (2 inch size) fresh ginger
• 1 clove garlic
• 1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds
• 6 black peppercorns
• 2 star anise
• 6 cups water
• 3 tablespoons brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons five spice powder

***Stir Fry***

• 4 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 bunch green onions
• 1 piece (1 inch size) fresh ginger
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 medium red bell pepper
• 1/4 pound sugar snap peas
• 2 tablespoons oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon garlic chili powder
• 1/2 cup reserved cooking broth