Shanghai style braised pork

May 3, 2025 12:18 PM

I've been a bit mentally tired lately, and so I've been sticking to the basics with my cooking. That means making a lot of the same dishes over and over, and I know that's not very exciting for the food blog. But I've had some photos from the past couple of months that have been sitting on my phone, and I wanted to share these at some point, so here we go!

Remember how I hang out with one of my friends every other week and we pick a dish to make? Well there was one time when another friend picked out a dish for us, and she went with Shanghai style braised pork belly. Except we only had access to Aldi, so we used pork butt instead. I think it was a better choice anyway. We also used granulated sugar instead of rock sugar because that's what we had available.

It was tasty and not too hard to make! The recipe called for waaay more water than we needed so it took a while to evaporate, but other than that it was pretty straightforward. I also stir fried some broccoli using the method from Made With Lau.

And I was even inspired to make it a second time on my own, and this time I was better about not using too much water for the braising process. I also tried using brown sugar instead of white sugar just to see if that would make a difference. I don't think it did.

I did get a little fancy and I bought sesame seeds just so I could have them as a topping. And I stir fried bok choy this time. Overall, I think this attempt was even better! I do want to make this a third time, but with some hard boiled eggs as well. I feel like I missed out on having braised hard boiled eggs this Easter (you know, with how expensive eggs are now), but the egg prices are going down a little!

Anyway, I was originally going to put a lot more dishes in this post, but I feel like I've typed enough, so until next time!