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Dinner · 40 min · 4 plates

Char siu

Five-spice sketch: cinnamon and star anise. Honey so it lacquers. Don't burn the sugar.

The sheet · 4 plates · 40 min

easy

Why tonight. Five-spice sketch: cinnamon and star anise. Honey so it lacquers. Don't burn the sugar.

What it needs

Nothing confirmed on your shelf yet — this list is the whole ask.

  • pork
  • soy sauce
  • honey
  • cinnamon
  • garlic

Good if you have them, fine if you do not: star anise.

Method

  1. Marinate overnight if you can — this is a cut and a marinade that both want the time.
  2. Roast on a rack over water, so the drips do not burn and the oven does not smoke.
  3. Baste with the reserved marinade every fifteen minutes. The lacquer is built in layers and one coat is not char siu.
  4. The last five minutes go hot to caramelize the edges. Those blackened tips are the best part and are meant to be there.

An educational plan from a curated corpus. Not a nutrition, allergen, or doneness guarantee.

Cook or pour it, then edit the shelf if you emptied a bottle or used the last of something.

Why each of these is on the list

What the ingredients are actually doing

pork
The forgiving meat. Shoulder takes hours and rewards them, chops take minutes and punish you for one too many, and the fat is the flavor in both cases.
soy sauce
Salt with a savory backbone, so it seasons and deepens in one move.
honey
Sweetness with a floral edge and enough body to change the texture of what it is in.
cinnamon
Warm and sweet-smelling without being sweet, which is why it works in a stew as readily as in a pastry.
garlic
Burns in seconds and turns the whole dish bitter, so it almost never goes in first.

Missing one of them? The substitutions are written against those jobs rather than against a chart, so they say what each replacement costs this dish in particular.

Cooks from the same box

If you bought for this, you can already make these

Next

Cook it, then tell the shelf what you used.

The ranking is only as honest as the shelf behind it. Empty the cream, and everything that leaned on cream should stop being offered.

Update the shelfWhy pork and soy sauce workBack to the ranking