I have recently (early October 2005) been dabbling with cooking food in the style of the world's leading restaurants, this means typically dishes with many flavours, contrasts and texture and often layers of food. I can highly recommend John Campbell's "Formulas for Flavour", I bought this recently on Amazon when searching for books by Heston Blumenthal (Chef proprietor of the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray) , he only wrote the foreword in fact but this mistake on my part was soon forgotten as the book is fantastic but is certainly not for the beginner. Anyway I decided to port the concepts to Asian food, something some of the top Asian restaurants have been doing for a while now and the following was my first attempt and I think it worked pretty well (all of my kids devoured it). Basically the idea is to create a very thick chinese style curry ( I did chunks of onions and carrots but this could be changed to anything you prefer) this is laid on the plate in a small bed large enough to support the pork which is grilled or fried with just a little seasoning of salt and pepper. On the curry bed you place a few slices of the fresh chilli if you like it hot, then some chopped coriander leaves, then top with the pork. Then you ladle over 1-2 table spoons of a very thick well reduced sweet and sour sauce. I stopped at this point but I think this would have benefitted from having something like julienne carrots, finely sliced spring onions or toasted sesame seeds sprinkled over or maybe even a little of each.
For the curry bed, chop an onion and a carrot to small but not very fine pieces, fry with some olive oil until onion is cooked but not brown, add curry powder, cinnamon and five spice powder (about 1 teaspoon of each), add 1 teaspoon sugar and season with salt to taste. Meanwhile melt a knob of butter in a small pan and add 1-2 tablespoons of cornflour and mix in well, add this to the curry and mix a little water in (not too much, this bed should be a thick curry paste rather than a sauce).
For the sweet and sour sauce, use 1 cup pineapple juice, add sugar and vinegar and about 1 tablespoon tomato puree , stir well and heat on a high heat to reduce the sauce down to a thick semi-jam state. I used a four leaf balsamic which is very much more sweet than sour so used cider vinegar as well to top up the sour, I used 2 tablespoons of each and about 1/3rd cup of sugar but you can adjust this to your own taste.
I fried the pork in a little olive oil and salt and pepper. This was served with a special fried rice made into a small mound by pressing into a ramekin and turning it out onto the plate.
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