La Rou from Taste of Hunan and Recently Consumed

I had to smile when “FOY” Dereck just commented on my revisit to Taste of Hunan which I did almost a month ago. We have already revisited yet again! But, since I’d recently done a post, I didn’t take any photos of that visit. There was one item on the menu that we noticed for the first time. ToH actually sells La Rou, the Hunan cured and smoked pork by weight! The Missus asked the always friendly Server about that and She was told that it is shipped to ToH from Hunan Province! They don’t always have it for sale, but she went to check and said they had one piece. So, here’s where it gets interesting…..you have to purchase the entire piece, they will not portion it for you. The price is $25.95 per pound. Not cheap, but you really don’t use a lot of La Rou per dish. We really like the La Rou ToH uses, so we decided to get it. The piece came in at 2 pounds! The woman was so nice, instructing us to freeze what we don’t use.

In case you’re wondering what 2 pounds of La Rou looks like.

And that my friends is a full sized cleaver!

What I did is divide up the LA Rou into four, almost equal sized portions, let’s just say a half pound or so.

I kept one portion for current use and the other three went into the freezer. There’s a hard “rind” at the bottom of the piece. When first using the piece, I’ll remove the rind, which also had a good fat layer. This comes in handy later….. We found that one piece can make about 4 dishes…so let’s say about a quarter pound of la rou….and that’s a generous amount!

So, of course first up was what we’ve been making a lot of recently, Clay Pot Rice. Instead of using duck fat or drippings to coat the nabe, we use the pork rind and melt the fat off the piece to lube the baby up!

In addition to the La Rou, we used Lup Cheong and slices of the Garlic Sausage from Wang La Ya in this.

The Missus loves La Rou with Celtuce (i.e. Chinese Lettuce – Wōsǔn/Wōjù).

So, I cut some fairly thin slices along with the Celtuce.

Adding some dried chilies, garlic, etc….. A very simple dish. No photo of the final product, because as soon as it hit the table, the Missus set out to devour it!

I’ve made a couple of other dishes since then, the Missus loves La Rou with Chinese Celery. Here’s a photo of the La Rou stir fried with Chinese Cauliflower (which I mentioned in the post).

I used Fresno Chilies, dried chili de arbol, and fermented chilies for this. I did a low heat stir fry of the cauliflower first, removing it from the wok, then going for it with the other ingredients and adding the cauliflower back in later.

Anyway….it’s been fun, since the frozen La Rou you get at 99 Ranch Market is horrible!

Some other stuffs……

I needed to use up the last of my beans from Rancho Gordo and only had those huge Royal Corona Beans left. So, I made up a pot of it.

I took half of the beans and made a dish with Merguez, Harissa, and chard from the yard! The Missus took most of it with Cous Cous for lunch and we also had some on toast, which was quite good!