Still Feeling Peckish

Chinese New Year is a tricky time for me. It is a completely carb-laden festival and most meals have hidden and not so hidden carbs. This year helper D asked if I was going to make pineapple tarts – I seriously considered this but even if I made a low carb shortcrust pastry, each portion of pineapple filling would add up to 9 carbs per tart…given that I try to keep to Dr Richard Bernstein’s guidelines on low carb diet of 6g carbs at breakfast and 12g carbs for lunch and dinner, a single tart would mean that I would probably be able to eat only 1 1/2 tarts for either lunch or dinner! 😳

So I decided to attack another bastion of Chinese New Year – Bak Kwa or Chinese barbecued beef jerky. This is a really important part of Chinese New Year and most people would gift packets of Bak Kwa as a high value gift. Bak Kwa is a sweet meat jerky and contains an astounding amount of sugar. So using sugar substitutes would make this workable.

I had pottered around and tried several recipes before. The first round wasn’t baked long enough and did not hold up well when I tried to do the final sear on a hot cast iron grill pan. I had also put too much five spice powder the first time round and was surprised the next day to discover that kid#1 had done his vacuum cleaner act and inhaled all the failed samples in the fridge. I was encouraged to give it another go.

The second round was more successful. This recipe used the oven and starts off with a slow bake that cooks the ground meat to form a neat layer that can later be sliced and roasted at very high heat. Because this is a low carb recipe there is no glaze (most home made Bak Kwa recipes use maltose) and therefore there isn’t a caramelization that one often sees in regular Bak Kwa. Nevertheless, this was a nice approximation of the original unhealthy version.

There are a couple of tricks to this recipe – the ground pork should be a little fatty and should not be over-minced so as to give a luscious chew and not be too dry. The final high heat roasting also needs the pork slices to be flipped over several times. This can probably be done alternatively over a high heat cast iron pan if you want a slightly burnt and crusty finish. Still, this looked and tasted almost like the real thing, and we should be ready to go into the New Year well-armed with low carb alternatives to CNY goodies!