Lucky Dragon Supper Club's Stir-Fried Cai Fan
Growing up, this dish was a weeknight regular on the dining table. It doesn’t require many ingredients, it’s a great way to use up bok choy and it comes together in 15 minutes. This stir-fried bok choy rice is my mum’s spin on cai fan (rice with salted pork and greens) which is a Shanghainese comfort dish that normally comes together in a clay pot. This is essentially the stir-fry version of that dish.
An ingredient to source: lup yok. You can find lup yok in most Asian supermarkets. It is Chinese cured pork belly that starts in a marinade of soy sauces, spices, sugar and wine before it is hung up to cure in colder months. It’s complex in flavour, incredibly tasty and is great steamed with rice. If lup yok is hard to find, you can sub for lap cheong (Chinese sausage).
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Serves 2 people as a main.
Method –
Place oil in a wok or fry pan over medium-high heat and add ginger and bok choy. Cook for about five minutes until most of the moisture has evaporated. Remove and set aside.
Clean out the pan, turn down the heat to medium and add the lup yok. Cook until the fat has rendered. Remove the lup yok, keeping the fat (or oil) in the pan.
Increase the heat to high. Once the pan starts to smoke, add the rice. Stir fry for a few minutes so that the grains are separated and coated in the fat. Add the cooked bok choy, lup yok and the sauce. Taste it and adjust seasoning to your liking.
Serve warm.
Ingredients –
1 tbsp oil
5-6 bulbs of bok choy, thinly sliced
6 slices of ginger
80g lup yok (Chinese cured pork belly), thinly sliced
2 cups of cooked, day-old rice
For the sauce:
1 tbsp soy sauce
½ tsp mushroom bouillon
½ tsp white pepper
½ tsp sugar
Tips –
Cook with day-old rice as freshly steamed rice has too much moisture.
Tread carefully with seasoning as lup yok is quite salty. I purposely left out salt in this recipe for this reason.
Find the video on how to cook it here –
@colournary Check out @luckydragonsupperclub's take on stir-fried cai fan loaded with #bokchoy for #colournary. Follow us for more recipe vids!#caifan#homecooking ♬ original sound - Colournary Magazine