Mastering Chinese-style ribs from your own kitchen

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 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, saltysweet 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. “Traditional Chinese kitchens don’t have ovens,” she said, “so the meat master would make roasted meats that couldn’t be cooked at home.”

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,” Kuan published a recipe for boneless cha siu. But cha siu-style 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.

Replicating Cantonese spareribs in 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 flavored with different grains and microorganisms, which turn colors — 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 — savory and mouth-filling flavor — to the plain food that people ate for most of human history.

Ketchup has considerable umami. 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 salty-sweet, umamirich 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. Her recipe for Chinese-style ribs is so easy that I have made it countless times. I serve them as dinner, not an appetizer, with freshly cooked rice and a bright green vegetable like smashed cucumbers or stirfried 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.) Bathing the ribs in steam by adding hot water to the roasting pan produced the precise texture I was after: tender and succulent.

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 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.

Phillips, the author of the encyclopedic cookbook, “All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China,” said the goal for cha siu ribs is creating layers of flavors and textures. This recipe easily accomplishes that, with very little work and without a grill.

“You want them to be crisped on the edges and licked by the heat,” she said. “Then the sweet stickiness, and then juicy meat.”