What it is
A Hakka stir-fry (薑絲大腸, also 薑絲炒大腸) of cleaned pork intestine with plenty of young ginger cut into fine strips. Vinegar goes in at the very end. It makes the dish tart and refreshing and softens the chewy intestine. Hakka restaurants treat it as a fixture of the menu.
Where it came from
The dish is one of the 'four braised, four stir-fried' (四炆四炒), the standard menu of a traditional Hakka banquet. The four stir-fries are Hakka stir-fry (客家小炒), this intestine dish, duck blood with garlic chives, and pig lung with pineapple and wood-ear fungus. Between them the eight dishes use most parts of a pig, in keeping with the Hakka dislike of waste.
How it is made
Cleaning the intestine is the hard part, and anyone who did it well was once praised as a capable, deft cook. The ginger is fried until fragrant, then the intestine goes into a very hot wok. The plate leaves the heat in under a minute, because intestine toughens if it cooks too long. Vinegar is added just before serving; one food writer names Kung Yen (工研醋), a common Taiwanese brand. The fierce heat of old cast-iron woks over wood-fired stoves suited the dish.
How to eat it
Order it at a Hakka restaurant as a shared dish with rice, perhaps with a braised dish or two from the same banquet set. It is best eaten hot from the wok.
Around Taiwan
- North
- Ceo 1950 in Taipei, a Michelin-listed Hakka restaurant, swaps the intestine for a fungus with a similar texture and stir-fries it in soy sauce with pomelo juice and yellow mustard.
- Hakka
- Part of the fixed eight-dish banquet of Hakka communities, where cleaning the intestine well and judging the heat marked a good home cook.
