Red-cooked pork pot pies

These are East-meets-West pot pie love babies. The pie crust hides finely sliced scallions [spring onions] and a touch of Shaoxing rice wine in its flakes, which results in the best pie crust I have maybe ever made.

The pies are filled with Shanghainese red-cooked pork, or hong shao rou, which is one of my all-time favourite dishes. It’s traditionally made with fat-laced pork belly, pan-fried in a bit of sugar until deliciously caramelised, then slowly braised (oh, how I love braised meat) in soy sauce and magical aromatics until fork-tender and coated in amber syrup. My favourite iterations serve it with hard-boiled eggs and knots of toothsome tofu skin to soak up all that pork flavour.

For these, I went with a simple pork-only filling, and to balance out the buttery pie crust, I used (barely) leaner pork ribs. The result was even better than I expected. It turns out that rich, flaky pie crust and savoury-sweet, garlicky-soy meat fillings are meant to be together.