Baked pork chop rice

Ingredientsserves 4

Equipment

• A shallow baking dish, about 25 × 18 cm, one dish for four

Method

1. Bash the chops with the back of the cleaver until they are half as thick again, and marinate thirty minutes in the soy, a teaspoon of sugar, the cornflour, half a beaten egg, white pepper and a tablespoon of oil. The café adds a pinch of bicarbonate of soda to tenderise; at home you can leave it out.
2. The fried-rice base: beat two eggs, fry them in two tablespoons of oil until barely set, add the cold rice and toss until every grain is separate and the rice is dry and loose; salt lightly and add the spring onion. The base must be dry or the sauce turns it to porridge; every Hong Kong cook insists on it, and the version on plain rice is just rice with gravy. Spread it in the greased dish.
3. Dust the chops in a thin layer of flour and pan-fry in two tablespoons of oil over medium heat, three minutes a side, until golden but not quite cooked through; the oven finishes them. Lay them on the rice. The café deep-fries; the pan loses nothing.
4. In the same pan melt the butter, soften the onion, add the tomato wedges and fry until they collapse, then the tomato paste for a minute until it darkens. Add the ketchup, the tablespoon of sugar, the Worcestershire and the stock, simmer five minutes, and thicken with a flour slurry to a pouring gravy. Taste: sweet, sour and a little salty.
5. Pour the sauce over the chops and rice so it runs to the edges. Scatter the cheese in a thin layer.
6. Bake at 220 °C (200 °C fan) for fifteen to twenty minutes until the cheese blisters brown and the sauce bubbles at the sides. The café finishes the dish under a salamander in minutes, so the rice stays loose while the top browns; a domestic oven is slower, so the fixes are a hot oven, a shallow dish, cheese in a thin layer, and pulling the dish when the sauce bubbles rather than waiting for a deep colour. If the oven has a grill, two minutes under it at the end gives the café's brown blisters.
7. Rest five minutes and serve from the dish. The thickest chop should show no pink when cut.

Take care

• Contains wheat (flour, soy sauce, Worcestershire), soy, egg (marinade and rice) and milk (cheese, butter). Pork cooked through: the oven finishes it, but cut the thickest chop to check there is no pink. Day-old rice must have been cooled fast and refrigerated, never left on the bench overnight; the dish is eaten hot, and reheated baked rice is reheated until steaming right through.

The story

Baked pork chop rice is the dish that made soy-sauce Western food a household phrase: a Western technique (bake under cheese), a Chinese base (egg fried rice) and a sauce that is neither, and it appeared on café and fast-food menus through the 1960s and 70s as the ovens arrived. 明周 puts the rice plate itself at the street stalls of Central in the 1930s and 40s, roast meat on white rice feeding dock workers; the baked plate is what that plate became once a shop had an oven.

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Lo Fo Tong is cultural food-heritage reference, not medical advice. If you are pregnant, unwell or on medication, talk to your doctor or registered practitioner before changing what is in the pot.