Black Bean Spareribs - Nov. 8th, 2010

Leftovers. I don’t mind them – especially when we get to take home leftovers from dim sum. But for some reason, there are certain dishes that is never left over at the end of the meal. For myself, one of the dishes is the black bean spare ribs. Our family rarely orders steamed black bean spareribs (aka pai gwat), which is sad because I really like the dish. The main reason we rarely order the dish is because my mom claims that it’s easy to make. Damn!

Well, pork ribs were on sale a few weeks ago, so we bought it, searched up a recipe online and then began to make it. My mom used the recipe as a guideline. This is my mom’s made up recipe.

2 pounds pork spareribs

2 tablespoons fermented black beans

A few garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon minced ginger

2 tablespoons dark soy sauce

2 teaspoons light soy sauce

1 tablespoon oyster sauce

1½ teaspoon sugar

1 tablespoon Chinese cooking wine

A few drops of sesame oil

1½ tablespoon baking powder 

A small chili pepper, finely minced (we used half of one of my dad’s bird eye chili) 

My mom chopped up the pork spareribs into smaller chunks, minced the garlic, soaked, drained and minced the black beans. It was all thrown into a large container.

The rest of the ingredients, except the baking powder, were mixed into the spareribs in the container. Since we didn’t want to eat it that night, the spareribs were thrown into the fridge to marinate over night. Alternately, you can marinate the spareribs (including the baking powder) for 3 hours before cooking. In our case, the baking powder was mixed into the marinated spareribs and thrown back into the fridge.

My mom stir fried the marinated black bean spareribs with some vegetable oil and then served with steamed rice. Because we didn’t exactly follow the recipe, a few things tasted off. My mom added too much ginger so the ginger overpowered the stink of the garlic. Also, I thought that there wasn’t enough sesame oil. Something was missing from the dish though. I can't put my finger on it. Anyway, it was pretty good. Meh.