Ginger Intestines

Ginger intestines, jiang si da chang, is one of the most beloved dishes of Hakka Taiwanese cuisine, the cooking tradition of the Hakka people who settled the Hsinchu and Miaoli hills of northwestern Taiwan from the 18th century. The Hakka, historically a poor, land-poor migrant group in southern China and Taiwan, developed a cuisine built on preserved foods, offal and intense seasoning, transforming cheap ingredients into flavoured dishes. Ginger intestines embodies this: pork intestines, cheap and requiring skill to clean, are stir-fried quickly with plenty of shredded ginger in a sauce of white vinegar, soy, sugar and garlic, the vinegar's acid both seasoning and tenderising the intestine. The dish is distinguished by its sour-salty flavour, unusual in mainstream Taiwanese cooking, and by the textural contrast of the crunchy intestine and the sharp ginger. It is a staple of every Hakka restaurant in Taiwan, eaten with rice, and the quality of the cleaning, the intestine must be free of any odor yet keep its crunch, is the test of the cook. The Hakka emphasis on offal and preserved seasonings is the dish's root.

Tender-crunchy pork intestines in a sharply sour, salty, gingery sauce, the shreds of ginger biting through, the vinegar making the mouth pucker. Eaten over rice, the crunch and the sourness cutting the richness, intensely flavoured.

The technique is the cleaning, the brief blanch, and the vinegar-thickened sauce. Pork intestines are turned inside out, scraped, and washed repeatedly with salt, starch and vinegar until perfectly clean and odorless, yet the washing is gentle enough that the intestine keeps its characteristic crunch when cooked. The cleaned intestines are blanched briefly, cut into pieces, then stir-fried over high heat with a large quantity of finely shredded ginger, the ginger's pungency essential to balance the richness of the intestine. The sauce is built on white vinegar, which gives the dish its sour character and its pale colour, with soy for salt, sugar for balance, and garlic, thickened slightly with cornflour so it clings. The vinegar is added late, near the end of cooking, to keep its sharpness, and the whole dish is finished in under five minutes over the highest heat, the intestine stir-fried just enough to flavour through but not long enough to lose its crunch. The sour-salty-vinegar sauce is unusual in Taiwanese cooking and distinctly Hakka.