Chinese pork balls are a popular dim sum item and soup ingredient made from ground pork, egg whites, ginger, cornstarch, salt, and white pepper. Some chefs add seafood for umami flavor. They are boiled or steamed and served in broth with noodles or seafood. Hsinchu, Taiwan holds an annual festival celebrating the dish.
The Chinese pork ball is popular individually as a bite-sized dim sum item or as the star of several Asian soups or noodle dishes. The balls are often pale white, which is the result of colorless additions to white pork such as egg whites, ginger, cornstarch, salt, white pepper, and occasionally chopped seafood such as shrimp. After being made into balls, the meat is steamed or boiled in a stock of water, rice wine, and perhaps largely colorless green onions and coriander.
The pork ball has become so well known in China that a Taiwanese city, Hsinchu, holds an annual festival to celebrate the dish in and around its Chenghuang temple in late September. The recipe, called gongwan tang, serves the balls in the broth in which they’ve been boiled. These balls are simple concoctions of ground pork, cornstarch, egg, sliced ginger, salt and pepper. They are formed into golf ball-sized portions and dropped into a boiling broth of water, rice wine, salt, and pepper. Once floating, the balls and broth are served with a garnish of sesame oil and chopped coriander, which are the leaves of the coriander plant.
In addition to pork, some chefs add a seafood element to a pork ball to achieve what is known in Asian culinary circles as umami, a fifth flavor element in addition to sweet, sour, bitter and salty. This is accomplished by adding minced shrimp, prawns or even cuttlefish to the ground pork and additional seasonings such as soy sauce, fish or oyster sauce, as well as egg, cornstarch and ginger.
Before forming each pork patty, cooks will thoroughly mix the patty ingredients and let it rest in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes. This makes the mixture completely malleable and able to withstand a hot boil without breaking. Once formed, the balls can be placed in steaming baskets and cooked over boiling water or simply dropped into a simple broth of water, wine and perhaps sliced ginger. The process will give the broth a meaty flavor and allow the chef to serve the pork patties doused in their own broth.
A regular accompaniment for pork ball is Asian noodles. Rice or egg noodles add carbohydrates to the dish, absorbing the flavor of the pork broth. Another variation involves adding seafood to the broth alongside the pork patties, not in them.
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