tuftears | Cooking Experiments: Sous Vide Char Siu Pork Loin, Stuffed Bell Peppers

Don't worry, I haven't stopped trying new things!

Here's an experiment with trying to make char siu pork loin using sous vide.

This wasn't bad but the pork loin came out a bit crumbly, i.e. you need to cut this with a really sharp knife or else the meat will fall apart rather than be easily cut. Real char siu should hold together better than that. I suspect that I need to try making it with well-trimmed pork belly or something like that. Still, it was a good experiment.

The baby bok choy was also an experiment. I steamed them, pretty much. Not bad, but not jumping-up-and-down exciting.

I made these for breakfast this morning! Originally, I was going to make those cute egg-filled bell pepper slices, with spinach on the side, but after I sautee'd 12 oz. of spinach, I had a really small pile of greens... I decided to try making spinach-and-egg-filled bell pepper slices instead, using the oven.

Note to future Tufty should I revisit this: don't. The problem is that the egg will leak out under the side of the bell pepper slices, where they don't evenly sit on the foil. So I wound up baking them twice. The first time formed an egg seal at the bottom of the pepper, then I added more eggbeater and baked that to get the 'real' egg. This left me with a considerable amount of 'wasted' eggbeater that had leaked out onto the foil and been charred black by the double baking time.

So, if I did this again, I would probably either need to make sure to get bell peppers that would sit nicely -- I couldn't do it with this particular bell pepper because its bottom was sloped-- or slice them sideways, giving me cup-shaped bell pepper sections instead of the rings I was trying this time. Oh well, live and learn!

The peppers were pretty tasty anyway, I had bacon mixed in with the spinach. Mm, bacon.