A study of Needle char siu
char siu | salmon creek farms pork shoulder, honey glaze, hot mustard
Picture says a thousand words. I need more char siu! @JeetKuneBao
Lovely lacquer with a bit of char. @Sgee
beef curry | short rib, potato, tomato, carrot, yellow curry, chili oil
This HK style curry is super robust in flavor but it’s got enough acidity in the sauce and the occasional burst of brightness from the tomatoes to balance it. Almost everything’s dialed in and refined. You think that the potato and vegetable in this curry won’t have much bite because they’ve been stewed down too much? Think again! Needle’s curry isn’t your typical HK cafe curry. Each ingredient here is treated with care and retained its structure and color vibrance. As if that’s not enough, the delicious chili oil that accompanied the dish is essentially an umami-ladened XO sauce that gives the curry a generous kick and lifts the dish to another level.
Even though this curry is already my favorite HK style curry in the city and a winner in my book, I do have two minor quibbles that most people wouldn’t care about:
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The potatoes are typically a star of a nice HK curry because they’re so flavorful. However, even though I like that the Needle potatoes are creamy and comes in big chunks, but perhaps due to its size, the flavor of the curry didn’t get soaked in. Maybe these potatoes can sit in the curry longer to suck up more delicious curry flavor?
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The “ideal” beef briskets texture in a HK curry should be juicy, tender, yet gelatinous/elastic(the sinew) with a healthy amount of fat cap retained and the layer of membrane, or sinew, mostly untrimmed which is what makes it called 坑腩 in Cantonese. On the other hand, the Needle short ribs are slightly dry, lacking a bit of unctuousness that the fat cap brings and that all important gelatinous/elastic texture is pretty much missing. It would be nice if less of the fat cap and the white layer of membrane is trimmed off. But this could very well be what Needle is aiming for from the start.
For reference, the red arrows below show the parts that are trimmed off in Needle’s short ribs. They’re the key! But I do understand that many Western palates often don’t appreciate this gelatinous/elastic texture.
Picture stolen off Google
Picture stolen off Google
