Kitchen Curious: For down-home comfort, sprinkle some rousong

The magical moment. So many recipes have them. It's the transformative time when something rises (biscuits!) exactly like it's supposed to. Perhaps an emulsion comes together — a beautiful wedding of liquid bliss. It could be a long-awaited smell. Maybe an anticipated crackle and pop.

In the case of rousong, the pivotal step is when, after more than 3 hours of cooking pork tenderloin down to nothing, shredding the remains, then adding a bit of oil, the meat puffs up like the fluffy filling of a down comforter.

Funny, because rousong, also known as pork floss, pork wool, meat floss, pork sung and pork fu, is part of the down-comforter family of foods. The braised, then pan-dried shredded meat is often served atop rice porridge — congee, jook — that east Asians serve to the young, old and infirmed.

But, as cookbook author Karen Solomon notes in her recently published cookbook “Cured Meat, Smoked Fish & Pickled Eggs” (Storey, $19.95), rousong is also tasty atop rice, noodles, tofu, pizza and, if you want a carnivorous duo, chocolate-covered bacon.

We've sung the praises of the pork sung roll at Sweet Hut bakery before. If you don't have the time or inclination to cook this meaty condiment at home, make the drive and eat up. But there's a lot to love about having a bag of Asian pork bits in the pantry to sprinkle on anything that needs some down-home comfort.

Excerpted from “Cured Meat, Smoked Fish & Pickled Eggs” ©2018 by Karen Solomon. Used with permission from Storey Publishing.