An Unpleasant Visitor

One of Gang's favorite Chinese cuisine is Twice-cooked Pork. The recipe is simple and straightforward: cook the pork belly twice - boiling it  first and then frying it. But the most tricky step is to slice the meat. Experienced chefs can cut the port belly into slices around a quarter centimeter thick and two inches long after boiling the entire chunk, and then fry these small slices with spicy sauce, green pepper and baby bamboo. The thinner the slices are, the better this dish tastes. I tried to follow the recipe strictly and slice the meat after boiling it, but never succeeded. Pork becomes soft and greasy when it's half cooked, and I never got slices which were thin enough for the next step.


As an alternative, I decided to slice the meat before boiling it. I froze the pork for 1-2 hours, and sliced it with a knife. Frozen meat is not greasy as it's covered by frost and firm enough to get thin pieces off. I did get very thin slices in this way. Very luckily this trivial adjustment to the original recipe doesn't make a big difference to the taste of dish. There is only one problem: it's not very pleasant to process the the meat when it's just removed from the freezer. The entire 2-lb piece of meat is hard and cold, and requires a lot of efforts to slice every piece off; moreover I need to warm my hands from time to time when processing it. I suppose it's sort of trade off: have good food at the cost of sour arms and cold hands. Also, the entire process may last for an hour, as you can imagine, the slices I get later on are not as thin as the early ones because the frozen meat start to thaw! 


Women should be emancipated from kitchen, as I always believe. Gang and I finally decided to buy a meat slicer from ebay, which seems to be able to process any sort of food in its ads. We waited for two days for its arrival, and were really excited to open the package. The blade looked sharp and the machine looked well designed. But it was not the case when we used it. It could not cut even the softest piece off! I placed the meat on the platform, and moved it towards the blade. The blade did slice meat well at the beginning, but could not cut the slice off when I pushed the platform to the right end of the machine. There is a gap between the left end of platform and the blade, so that the blade can not reach the very end of the meat. I turned off the meat slicer, and moved the pork out. Now it looked like a funny giant with a long and thin tail attached to the end. I tried several times, but the slicer could not cut off a single slice of meat for me, the only thing I got was the same chunk but with more tails. I could probably hold the meat with my hand instead of laying it on the platform and got it sliced by the blade, but I decided not to take this risk. 


I admit I was credulous of product reviews, and it was a mistake to buy such a fatally flawed slicer. Gang and I mailed it back to the ebay seller a few days later at a cost of around $12. Again I am reaffirmed of fact that machines are not substitutes for people. We may be lazy and stupid, but at least we can slice the meat off the chunk.