Creating

Each month we take a new-tothe-supermarket product and ask a food writer to create a recipe using it. To launch this new feature, Su Scott experiments with guanciale, now available at Waitrose.

Baked cheesy kimchi rice with guanciale

1 HOUR | SERVES 2 | EASY | GF

Koreans love a pork and kimchi pairing. Well-ripened kimchi is preferred here as it carries incredible depth of flavour. Cooked down in the succulent, almost sweet-tasting rendered fat of guanciale, it becomes gorgeously silky and unctuous. Fried eggs are optional but I would strongly recommend you have them as the crispy egg white is a welcome break between the salty and spicy bite, while the egg yolk adds another layer of lusciousness.

vegetable oil 1 tbsp guanciale or bacon lardons 60g, diced mirin 1 tbsp

gochujang (Korean fermented chilli paste) 1 heaped tsp kimchi 200g, roughly chopped

oyster sauce 2 tsp

sugar 1 tsp

cooked and cooled leftover short grain rice 300g

cheese 120g, coarsely grated (cheddar, gruyère, provolone and mozzarella all work well, or use a mixture)

spring onion 1, finely sliced

fried eggs 2 to serve (optional)

1 Heat the oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6. Pour the oil into a 26cm ovenproof, non-stick or cast iron frying pan set over a medium heat, add the guanciale and fry for 5 minutes or so, until the fat has rendered down and it starts to crisp up.

2 Add the mirin and gochujang, and stir briefly, then add the kimchi, oyster sauce and sugar. Fry gently for 5 minutes until the kimchi has softened a little and smells fragrant.

3 Turn the heat off. Stir in the rice and a third of the cheese, and mix thoroughly so the rice is evenly distributed.

4 Using the back of a spatula or a large spoon, spread the rice thinly and evenly around the pan, pressing down quite firmly.

5 Transfer the pan to the oven and bake for 30 minutes. Scatter the remaining cheese on top, then bake for a further 5-10 minutes. 6 When ready, scatter over the spring onion, then serve hot with or without fried eggs.

PER SERVING 623 kcals | fat 33.3G | saturates 15.4G | carbs 54.4G sugars 7G | fibre 2.3G | protein 25.2G | salt 4.3G

Su Scott is an award-winning blogger, having most recently won an OFM award in 2019 in the reader’s recipe category. Recipes on her blog (@babaganuj) are influenced by her childhood in Korea as well as her time living in the UK, dishes that she and her husband recognise as “our food, from two continents and beyond”.