Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man tries to drag you all into culinary enlightenment whether you want it or not. I’m your Belligerent Buddha of Breakfast, Jon O’Guin. Today’s dish is a contradiction in terms, goals, ideas, and generally a mess while being surprisingly easy. If you don’t want to hear that intentionally enticing tale, you can click the link to ruin my hopes and dreams and get cooking quicker. For all my FRIENDS, let’s talk about this mess.

Lost in The Woods

I already complained last Thursday about how, despite already living a life of social distance, the pandemic and its resultant effects had spiraled my life into chaos and confusion. But, for a quick refresher/illustration, I realized on Saturday that it had been literally just over a week since I had left a circle of roughly 2,000 square feet. And the only reason it’s ONLY been a week is because on the 19th I walked to a 7-11 a quarter mile away and bought cat food. (and human ‘food’, but the purpose was the cat food)

This is apparently a week’s worth of food for the furball.

As such, it’s been difficult to plan meals, and that has done a NUMBER on my family’s diet the last little while. Our sodium consumption has sky-rocketed. We’re talking 3-4 meals this week were some pizza. And I put that modifier there on purpose: we did not ORDER pizza 3-4 times. We ordered pizza ONCE and ate it 4 times. And as a man who hungers for stimuli, who craves change and/or novelty, this was not a situation that could be permitted to stand. Which is why I’ve kept referencing that I was going to make Polenta: with all the meat recipes we did this month, I wanted to make something vegetarian and interesting. But after a week of searching, I have no idea where our Polenta went. And luckily, our store of Cat food had dwindled, so we HAD to go to the store Sunday, and I procured supplies to make…about 4-5 recipes. It was going to be more, but it appears that SOME of my ideas aren’t all that original. Like, ALL the flour and yeast was gone from Safeway. So I have to dig around and see if we have yeast before I do anything bread related…Fuck, I just realized I forgot to get buns at the store. That’s fine. I have several days to work on it.

But, in order to kind of wean my family onto some more healthy choices, I decided to stick close to what we had been eating, but with, you know, more vegetables, and a sense of actual accomplishment. And that’s why we’re making Lion’s Head Meatballs. Which I wanted to briefly mention might be a complicated choice, and are being judged by a complicated criteria.

Complicated? In CHINA? Say it isn’t so!

Basically, with this dish, I can tell you what I thought about it, and what my family thought about it, but I can’t really tell you if we “succeeded”, because this is one of quite a few dishes for which I have no “sensorial reference point”. Which is pretentious talk for “I’ve never eaten it.” More than that, I’ve never seen, smelled, touched, heard, or tasted it, in person. Which isn’t actually all that unusual: I’d say about half the things we make here are things I’m shooting blind at, or I’m inspired by a clip in a show or something. I just want to bring that up out of the gate because my research indicates that, in China, there are distinct ‘traditions’ in how to make it, as well as a lot of variations, so I’m not trying to say that these are perfect. Far from it:  I want to set up, out the gate that this specific recipe is for a “light” “clean” version of the recipe. A qing dan recipe. Which hopefully conveys to any Chinese readers my intent. And to my American readers with no understanding of why I’m suddenly being so careful: Imagine if someone showed up with an “Chowder recipe”, and it was based off of Manhattan Clam Chowder.

Yep. That’s what I think of when I hear “Chowder”.

There is a wide swathe of Americans who would be confused, and maybe even offended, by someone calling a Minestrone with Fish in it a “chowder”. That’s the kind of thing I’m worried about. But let’s get some more context on what, exactly, is going on here.  

The Mane Event

Lion’s Heads, also called Lion’s Head Meatballs, and rendered as something like shi zi tou in Romanized Chinese are meatballs. BIG meatballs.

That’s MY fist. I am not a small man.

They’re normally steamed or braised, and served in broth, with some kind of cabbage cooked in the broth, and maybe some other vegetables or noodles. They got their name because the big meatball sitting on a bed of crinkly cabbage supposedly looked like the head of a lion on its mane, or because the meatball’s shape and craggly texture looks like the features of a foo lion/lion dog.

Not to be mean to these divine guardians, but…yeah, they do kinda got meatball heads.

My understanding is that there are two main classic approaches to the dish: “white” or “red”, and that this is based on whether or not the broth is clear or dark in color. (“Red cooked” is a common Chinese term, meaning “stewed, braised, or glazed in a ‘red’ sauce”, which can be made with a bunch of reddish-brown ingredients, or a mixture of them.)  And that the dish probably originated in…oh boy. Wikipedia suggests in originated in Yangzhou or Zhenjiang, which are cities in Jiangshu, which are part of the Jiangnan region. (Again, to contextualize, this is roughly the equivalent of saying “it originated in Knoxville or Memphis, cities in Tennessee, which is part of “The South”.) And trust me, we are already simplifying and organizing. (Like, technically, this is more of a Tennessee vs the Appalachians comparison)

THE POINT is that there are different traditions for the dish, and different ingredients. Mine is based off of what I am given to understand is a Jiangnan interpretation, which is a region noted for qing dan or “clean” cooking, meaning not greasy or oily. It might also be interpretable as “clean and bland”, and mean something akin to US medical diets: a lot of vegetables, few oils, broths and grains, white meat sparingly, kind of situation.

Turns out, it’s really hard to get good pictures of the kind of diet I’m talking about.

In short, I am INTENTIONALLY making a kind of bland version of this dish. I take ONE step to punch it up, and then immediately back down from it. And that’s because, from the resources I’ve seen, this is a dish that can be modified and altered in a lot of ways. The trick is just getting your balls right. So let’s talk about that.  

Bouncy and Tender Balls

I’m going to spend a fair bit on the balls in this recipe because…well, they’re most of the recipe. There are three ingredients to this recipe that aren’t part of the meatballs, and they’re handled SUPER simply. So the focus is, as it so often should be, on the balls.

What makes Lion’s Head Meatballs so enjoyable, according to most people, is that, despite being the almost the size of your fist, they have a remarkable texture. See, the traditional recipe for the meatballs uses a 50-50 pork meat and pork FAT ratio, achieved by using Pork belly, and beats the ever-loving CRAP out of the mixture. If you’ve ever gotten advice on making burger patties, you may know why that’s relevant. For everyone else: basically, the more you work ground meat, the tighter it locks up. If you overwork beef for a burger, it ends up tough. Here (and in sausage making), you’re intentionally over-working the meat, so it traps the fat in a tighter ‘web’. If that’s still confusing, imagine fishnet stockings versus tights: on a fundamental level, they’re the same product; threads of fabric with gaps between them used to cover the legs. But the tights have a much smoother feel, because their net is smaller. The more you work meat, the smaller the “net”.

Not a comparison I anticipated making, but not an inaccurate one.
Also, it took a WHILE to find not implicitly or directly sexual fishnet pictures, even with Safesearch ON.

This works in the traditional recipe because, again, there’s a lot of NOT meat in it. In addition to the fat, there’s also flavorings, little additions, and binding agents. But it poses a bit of a problem to more health-conscious modern chefs: if the original recipe works because it’s ONE HALF FAT, how can you make it work with less fat? Because we’d like there to be less than…two SOLID OUNCES of fat per meatball. (or roughly 400 calories JUST FROM THE FAT per meatball). Because the same tactic will not work with ‘normal’ meat: If we really want to continue the stocking metaphor, the amount of meat vs fat can be measured as, like, the thickness of the fabric. Try and work a normal thing of ground pork like the traditional recipe, and you won’t end up with tights, you’ll end up with long johns. Or pants The answer is: THROUGH SCIENCE.  Or substitution. Some recipes ‘cheat’, and mix normal ground pork with Tofu, which serves as a pseudo-fat to be interwoven with the pork. Some use pork shoulder, which is often fattier than ground pork, but less than belly, and do similar tricks with it.  Ours uses baking soda. For reasons I DO NOT have the academic background to fully explain, Baking soda makes it harder for the meat to form the bonds. (To hopefully use the stocking metaphor for the last time, the baking soda makes the mixture into…yoga pants, I guess: Not a perfect replication of the tights, but closer than basically anything else, and easy enough to mistake for them in the right conditions.)

So, in order to yoga-pants our pork (A sentence that makes me SLIGHTLY worried that I may have had a stroke and not noticed it) we’re going to start with a mixture of water, baking soda, and salt in our stand mixer.

Shown here without water. Or visual clarity.

Oh, shit, I forgot to mention that: this recipe, in order to avoid having to like, manually knead the pork mixture and smack the shit out of it with your real hands, uses a stand mixer. You know, that thing people use to make bread? Yeah, I figured that I could still use it even if we didn’t have yeast. If you DON’T have a stand mixter, then the process is still doable, it’s just a lot more of a pain. The recipes I’ve found suggest around 10 minutes of hand-whipping with a rubber spatula to get the same kind of texture. Which I’m not going to lie, sounds like a lot of work, and I’m glad I skipped it, but I will make this extension of an olive branch:  the rest of the process is SUPER easy, so maybe you can like, force a family member to help you by doing that part.

Someone with BIG, STRONG HANDS, perhaps.

Because here’s the breakdown of how this goes: you get all the ingredients you want in the meatballs. You mix them together, and form them into 8 balls, about 3 inches across, a little more than half a cup apiece. At the same time, you get an oven-safe pot with a lid, and get a quart of broth boiling in it. I used Chicken stock, and later watered it down, because…well, because at the store I said “Almost every time you use broth, you could use stock, and it would just be better.” And it wasn’t until I got home, and learned "Oh, hey, this is explicitly a version mimicking the gentler and more mild flavors of Jiangnan cooking”, that I realized that this was one of those times where broth is more appropriate.

Once the meatballs are formed, you take the broth pot off the stove top, and put the balls in. You want a ring of 7 balls around an middle 8th one. Then you pop the lid on, and pop the whole shebang in a 325 degree oven, and you are DONE for an hour. And that’s legitimately like, 2/3rds of the recipe.

Whoaaa, we’re two thirds there
whooaaa-OH, Meatballs are still rare!

Seriously, the next step is to cut up some napa cabbage into 2-3” strips. I found that putting the cabbage leafed end down, and cutting through the root down to the tips was easier for eying my quarters. Snip out the core, and slice into chunks. It’s like, 3 minutes of effort.  Then thinly slice some scallion greens (which is lucky, because you had to mince scallion whites for the meatballs!)

Then, after the pork’s been braising for an hour, you pull it out of the broth, and move it to a plate to dirty for a minute, as you just throw your cabbage into the pot in a roughly even layer before putting the meatballs back in, on top of the cabbage.

This looks like food, right?

Put it back in the oven for another 30 minutes, and make some rice noodles. Bring a gallon of water to a boil, take it off the heat, and throw some rice noodles in to soak for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure they’re not clumping. Drain the noodles, rinse them, and drain them again, and…you’re done.

Just plop some noodles in a bowl, and ladle over some broth and cabbage, with 1-2 meatballs per bowl, sprinkle in those scallion greens if you want them, and you’ve finished.

The scallions are the only part of this that make it visually interesting.

How’d it turn out? Well, my DOUBTING FAMILY gave me shit because THEY DON’T KNOW SCIENCE. By which I mean that, since baking soda raises the pH of the pork meat, it WILL make the meat a little “pinker” than normal ground pork, and that’s no reason to be concerned. (In their defense, I only partially remembered that, so I will accept that my protests may not have sounded entirely convincing. On the other hand, it’s been 10 years since the FDA lowered the “correct pork temp” and said a little pink is fine (which technically only applies to whole cuts, but that’s also true of beef, and I don’t hear them complaining when they get a burger medium-rare) and my mother has called damn near every piece of pork she’s eaten in the last 5 years “a little pink” unless it was broken down to the point that it was impossible to cut open and check.

I ranted about that because there’s not much to say. As Nate summarized: “The meatballs were good”, before a long and pointed silence, that he then clarified was INTENDED to be interpreted as a pointed dismissal of the rest of the dish. Mother basically agreed, and I have to kind of nod along: the pork does have a nice texture, and it’s like a mild gyoza filling, and the rest of the dish…is chicken broth and cabbage. There’s nothing terrible about it, but it’s also not impressive.

It’s a blank canvas of a dish, and that’s partly why I’m excited to tell you guys about it. Because I think there are a TON of fun ways you can tinker with the recipe in your homes. You can try using tofu instead of baking soda. I’ve seen recipes that call for diced water chestnuts in the pork, diced and seared shitake mushrooms, or five spice powder. You can “red cook” it by making the ‘broth’ out of a mixture of mushroom and chicken broth, with brown sugar, soy sauce, and sesame oil.  You can make it Shanghai style by adding garlic to the meat, browning it on all sides, and then steaming it with no broth on a pound of cabbage or bok choy for 40 minutes. You can DEEP FRY the meatballs for a couple minutes to brown, before simmering for 20 minutes.

This is the mirror to my earlier caution. I’m not saying my recipe was perfect. I’m saying it’s a good place to start, and it’s a recipe ready and ripe for riffing. I’m telling you all the ways you can make chowder, not showing up with the Manhattan stuff and claiming it’s the only option. So if you’ve got some time, and want a Chinese dish you can make you own, that’s only got ONE bad step (two if you hate getting meat on your hands), then I suggest you try it.

THURSDAY: LOOK, I BARELY PULLED TODAY’S POST INTO A SEMBLANCE OF SANITY. WE’LL SEE WHERE THE WEEK TAKES US.

MONDAY: I’VE GOT THE INGREDIENTS FOR A COUPLE INTERESTING OPTIONS, SO I’LL LET YOU KNOW THURSDAY.  

Recipe

“Simple” Lion’s Head Meatballs

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

¾ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon table salt

2 pounds ground pork

1 large egg, lightly beaten

2 scallions, white parts minced,  and green parts sliced thin

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons Shaoxing wine or dry sherry

4 teaspoons sugar

2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

½ teaspoon white pepper

4 cups chicken broth

1 small head napa cabbage (1½ pounds)

4 ounces rice noodles (Did I measure mine in any way? No.) 

Preparation

1. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit, and place 4 quarts of broth on the stovetop in a large oven-safe pot over high heat to bring to a boil.

2. Mix together baking powder, salt, and 2 tablespoons water in the bowl of a stand mixer. Add pork, and toss to combine. Then add the egg, scallion whites, soy sauce, wine, sugar, ginger, and pepper. Place the paddle attachment on the mixer, and process on medium speed for 45-60 seconds, until it’s all combined, the mixture is starting to pull away from the walls of the bowl and ball up a little, and the pork is lighter in color.

3. Form the mixture into 8 balls roughly ½ cup apiece, or about 3 inches across.  Remove the broth pot from the heat, and place the meatballs in the broth. Cover the pot, and place in the oven to braise for an hour.

4. While the meat braises, quarter the napa cabbage, core it, and chop into 2-3” chunks. Remove the pot from the oven, pull the meatballs from the broth, and add the cabbage in an even layer to the broth. Place the meatballs back in the pot, flipped over from before if possible, cover and return the pot to the oven for another 30 minutes.

5. While THAT cooks, prepare the noodles by bringing a gallon of water to a boil, removing from the heat, and putting your noodles into the hot water to soak for 10-15 minutes. Separate the noodles into bowls, and remove the pot from the oven, ladling broth, cabbage, and 1-2 meatballs into each bowl.