KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL

Not as daunting as it sounds, with a few workarounds

The perfect avocado, not too squishy and not too firm, should maintain its integrity when sliced.

In any city, a promising sign that you have arrived in a serious Cantonese food zone is a siu laap: a storefront dedicated to roasted and cured meat. For meat lovers, it is a beautiful sight: racks of mahogany-skinned birds, sugar-shiny slabs of pork ribs, and all that thrillingly saturated, sticky redness. Siu mei, or “fork burned” meat, is a particular specialty of Guangzhou (formerly called Canton), the province that sent the first large group of immigrants from China to the United States in the late 1800s. Siu mei became a popular export everywhere Cantonese cooks went — especially cha siu, the juicy, red-tinged, salty-sweet pork that routinely tops bowls of ramen in Japan and fills banh mi sandwiches in the many Little Saigons of the United States.

Carolyn Phillips, a historian of Chinese cuisine, said siu mei was traditionally made by experts in the capital city of Guangdong, who hung the big pieces of meat on hooks in large coal- or wood-fired ovens so the heat could flow evenly around them. “Traditional Chinese kitchens don’t have ovens,” she said, “so the meat master would make roasted meats that couldn’t be cooked at home.”

In other words, siu mei is something food lovers buy, not make — much like charcuterie in France, pit barbecue in the American South and Central European deli meats like pastrami and corned beef.

Food writer Diana Kuan grew up in a family that ran Cantonese restaurants throughout her childhood, first in Puerto Rico and later in Massachusetts. She said that if siu mei has a fuchsia rather than a scarlet hue, skip it.

“My mother was terrified of the siu mei she saw when we moved to Boston,” she said. “Even in Chinatown, it was magenta, not red” — the sure sign of cutting corners with food coloring.

In The Chinese Takeout Cookbook, Diana Kuan published a recipe for boneless cha siu, because it was on the restaurant menu every day, served on its own with rice and greens, or stuffed into fluffy steamed bao. But cha siustyle spareribs, she said, were a treat, reserved for special family events.

Just as I would not attempt to replicate pit barbecue in my New York kitchen, I did not think it would be easy to cook a credible version of Cantonese spareribs at home. Like everyone seeking a “best” recipe, I dreamed of recreating a version I loved in childhood. Spareribs, an old-school egg roll and chicken with cashew nuts (extra water chestnuts, no celery, please) was my standing order at Chun Cha Fu, a formal “Mandarin” restaurant we visited weekly when I was young. Those ribs were salty-sweet, juicy, tender but not falling off the bone, and crusted with a sticky exterior that can only be described as “candied meat.”

Replicating Cantonese spareribs i n a modern kitchen is not difficult. But it demands some workarounds that may make purists uncomfortable.

Such as ketchup.

The red color of traditional cha siu comes from a creamy, funky bean paste called nan ru. Nan ru is tofu that is brined and fermented with rice that has been inoculated with a deep red strain of mold. Like Japanese miso, tofu-ru (the general term for aged tofu) can be ripened to many different levels of funkiness, and flavoured with different grains and microorganisms, which turn colours — like the blue streaks in Roquefort and the green veins of Gorgonzola — as ripening takes place.

Tofu-ru, like miso, fish sauce and dashi, evolved over centuries in the interest of adding umami — savoury and mouth-filling flavour — to the plain food that people ate for most of human history.

Ketchup has considerable umami, located in its saltiness and its concentrated, cooked tomato flavour. It might seem like the most

inauthentic possible choice for cha siu, and it is true that tomatoes do not appear in the traditional sauces of Asia. But the story of ketchup does begin in East Asia, as a saltysweet, umami-rich fermented fish sauce called by some version of the name ke-jap.

I started my quest with a recipe from the invaluable Katie Workman, friend to frazzled cooks everywhere, who has a knack for making food that children like and that also tastes good to adults. Her recipe for Chinesestyle ribs is so easy that I have made it countless times, simply baking the racks at low heat for tenderness, then raising the heat and basting them for stickiness. I serve them as dinner, not an appetizer, with freshly cooked rice and a bright green vegetable like smashed cucumbers or stir-fried bok choy.

But the dish needed improvements to get closer to my grail ribs. After some research and development, I decided to skip Workman’s step of cooking the marinade (life is too short, and none of the traditional recipes make you do it); added fragrant five-spice powder; and introduced an important twist to the roasting method.

That twist — a steam bath — comes from Phillips, as does the five-spice powder. (She does not endorse ketchup.) Ribs that are roasted start to finish in an oven usually come out gnarled and dry. To fix that, some cooks boil them before roasting, which completely denatures the meat. Bathing the ribs in steam by adding hot water to the roasting pan produced the precise texture I was after: tender and succulent.

Fatty-skinned birds like geese and ducks, and well-marbled cuts of meat like pork ribs, shoulder and belly, are used for siu mei because the fat continually bathes the meat as it cooks. When choosing racks for this recipe, whether baby backs or full spareribs, make sure the meat is well marbled with fat, and that there’s a substantial cushion of meat between the bones.

Other than red fermented tofu, most of the traditional ingredients of siu mei are easy to find in Asian markets (and many supermarkets). The alcohol used need not be rice wine: Vodka, gin or another clear spirit has the same effect of enabling the flavors in your marinade to penetrate the meat.

Many modern Chinese cooks use maltose instead of honey for cha siu, because it produces a high-gloss, lip-smacking exterior. But the taste is virtually the same: The flavour of honey gets lost among the strong tastes, leaving only sweetness and a little stickiness behind.