Bak Kwa 肉干 recipe

I have still not gotten over Christmas & New Year and now Chinese New Year is around the corner! How time flies!? Well, it's time to get busy again. I bet a number of you who celebrate Chinese New Year might be busy cleaning, shopping, baking cookies as well as making yummy food such as Bak Kwa. 

Bak Kwa also known as "rou gan" in Chinese is a type of BBQ dried meat. It is easily available from some of the popular chains like Bee Cheng Hiang in Malaysia and Singapore. However, it's not commonly sold in Melbourne as compared to Malaysia. Although a few shops over here do sell Bak Kwa but I somehow never had the desire to try them. 

Well, when food is not easily available, you just create your own! So I made my own Bak Kwa. It's quite easy to make bak kwa at home. There are a lot of recipes on the Internet and I found that most of them are quite similar with slight difference in the portion of the seasoning. Hence, I just picked a recipe from Nasi Lemak Lover and adjusted the seasoning based on my own preference. The only tricky part for me is to evenly spread the minced meat on the baking tray. To me it's hard to make the layer thin, so my bak kwa ended up slightly on the thick side. Having said that, they are still yummy!

Recipe: 

500g Minced pork

100g sugar

1 teaspoon dark caramel sauce

1 tablespoon light soy sauce

1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine

1/2 tablespoon fish sauce

1 tablespoon oyster sauce

2 tablespoons honey

1/8 teaspoon five spice powder

Salt to taste

A few dashes of white pepper

1. Mix all ingredients in a bowl until the mixture is gluey. The gluey texture is important, otherwise the meat won't stick together. Store the meat in the fridge for several hours or overnight. 

2. Spread the marinated minced pork thinly and evenly on the baking tray. Some suggested to use a roller over a layer of cling wrap but I found that it's quite hard to apply the same pressure on the roller when spreading the meat across the baking tray. It ended up thinner on one side and thicker on the other. Besides that, the gluey meat tend to stick to the cling wrap when the cling wrap was being removed which was quite annoying. In the end, I literally used a metal spoon to touch up the surface. 

3. Bake in pre-heated oven at 160C for about 15mins. Remove the meat from the oven and increase the oven temperature to 220c.

4. When the meat on the baking tray is slightly cooled, cut them into your preferred size by using a scissors/knife/pizza cutter. Arrange the pieces back on the baking tray. 

5. Bake at grill mode (top heat only) at 220c for about 7mins or until it's brown.

6. Flip and grill on the other side for 5-7 mins at 220c. The timing and temperature setting vary depending on your oven. The rule of thumb is to bake/grill until the meat is brown (and with burnt bits if that's to your liking).

7. Remove it from the oven, let it cool and serve! (I find that the bak kwa tasted better on the following day after baking.)

Note: Adjust the oven temperature and timing accordingly as each oven is different. You might also be using different oven modes such as conventional, fan-forced or grill. Hence, the timing would be slightly different.