--- title: 'Recreating Macau''s Tamarind Pork Stew (or is it a curry?)' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=zPWe_aBuNfM' video_id: 'zPWe_aBuNfM' date: 2026-07-30 duration_sec: 1207 --- # Recreating Macau's Tamarind Pork Stew (or is it a curry?) > Source: [Recreating Macau's Tamarind Pork Stew (or is it a curry?)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zPWe_aBuNfM) ## Summary This video explores the endangered cuisine of Macau, focusing on recreating the traditional dish Porco Balichao Tamarindo (Tamarind Pork Stew). The host delves into the historical and cultural context of Macanese food, highlighting its influences from Portuguese, Cantonese, Malay, and other Southeast Asian cuisines, and provides a detailed step-by-step cooking guide with practical substitutions. ### Key Points - **Endangered Cuisines** [00:00] — About nine languages die every year; similarly, many cuisines are endangered, such as Macanese food, which is fading as the Macanese diaspora assimilates. - **Macanese Food Origins** [01:52] — Macanese cuisine is often called Cantonese-Portuguese fusion, but the dish Porco Balichao Tamarindo includes tamarind, which is neither Cantonese nor Portuguese, indicating broader influences. - **Shrimp Paste Connection** [03:33] — Traditional Macanese shrimp paste (Balichao) is hard to find; the diaspora often substitutes Filipino bagoong alamang, which is less fermented. This hints at connections across Southeast Asia. - **Peranakan Influence** [05:13] — Portuguese men often married Peranakan women from Malacca, who brought Malay and Chinese influences, making Macanese food part of a wider Portuguese trading network. - **Interpreting Historical Recipes** [07:58] — Historical recipes assume prior knowledge (e.g., soaking tamarind pulp correctly). They also use different ingredients; for example, modern pork is leaner, so pork shoulder and belly are better substitutes. - **Rendering Lard** [09:17] — To control fat, the host renders pork belly and fatty bits first, inspired by Filipino cooking, to achieve the right richness without excess grease. - **Cooking the Stew** [11:41] — The stew involves frying marinated pork, sweating onions and garlic, frying shrimp paste with spices, adding brandy, then braising with water, jaggery, dark soy, and tamarind juice. - **Pressed Rice Side** [15:52] — The dish is traditionally served with pressed rice: rice cooked with scallion lard, pressed into a dome, and cut into wedges to sop up the sauce. ### Conclusion Macanese cuisine, though endangered, offers valuable culinary lessons about global food networks and historical recipe interpretation. The Tamarind Pork Stew is a delicious example of how flavors from multiple cultures can combine into something unique. ## Transcript They say that on average, about nine languages  die every year. Now I don’t know how many   cuisines die per year, but there are plenty out  there’s that’re pretty endangered. I mean like…   just… imagine that one day the very last bacon egg  and cheese was topped over a New York bagel – or   the very last fish and chips came out of the deep  fat fryer. The world would lose something, right? Now the city of Macau it’s one of my favorite  places to eat in the world. There’s very good   Cantonese food, there’s also some cool Portuguese  food, but interestingly there’s also Macau local   food. Because unlike the Brits across the estuary  in Hong Kong, historically the residents of Macau   were often mixed Eurasians and very much developed  their own local cuisine – their own variant of egg   tarts most famously, but also stuff like duck  rice or their own unique style of fermented   shrimp paste. And so if you’re someone like me  or Steph or really anyone who kind of staddles in   between these worlds of Chinese food culture and  Western food culture, I think it’s really natural   to be intrigued by what came before us in Macau. But even though the Macanese were renowned for   being good cooks, there never were really that  many of them. And as the world decolonized this   culture’s it’s begun to fade away, over the  generations dissolving into either Chinese or   Western societies. There’s still restaurants that  serve this stuff in Macao, but you could probably   count the really good ones on one hand. It’s  not dead, but it is endangered. But Macanese   food I think has a lot to teach us yet, with  culinary lessons there buried like treasures. For example… this dish here is Porco Balichao  Tamarindo, and it’s not just a tasty stew   but it also made me really rethink how food around  the world actually spreads. Because if you look at   a lot of food media, they often say that Macanese  food is Cantonese-Portuguese fusion. I mean,   I’m guilty too. But then… if that’s the case,  how are we to make sense of this thing. It’s a   very classic Macanese dish… there’s stuff there  that might feel explainably Chinese-Western,   marinating fatty meat, frying shrimp paste in  lard, that sort of thing… but then the braise   finishes with the titular tamarind juice.  But Cantonese food doesn’t use tamarind,   and I don’t think that Portuguese really  does either. So what exactly is going on. Now, we might be able to get a small clue from the  ingredient list. From what I’ve read, the general   sort of ‘southeast Asian’ shrimp paste, like the  sort that you might see in Thailand or Malaysia,   it’s not a direct sub for Macau’s traditional  Balichao. There’s some old recipes out there,   but unfortunately it’s brutally difficult  to find these days, so in the Macanese   diaspora people tend to recommend this  product. It’s a Filipino shrimp paste,   concocted from a genus called acetes, and you  can see it’s a lot less fermented. So Macanese   diaspora they’ll then mix that with some of the  what’s missing from their traditional recipes and   it all seems to work well enough. Now this  product it’s called bagoong alamang, so for   the sake of completeness let’s check YouTube,  see how the stuff’s eaten in the Philippines. So… this is a little weird. The combination  of Bagoong Alamang and Pork it seems to be   equally a classic and exist over there  in two forms – sauce form, braise form.   So like… fatty pork, check. Aromatics? Check.  Shrimp paste… check… and then they’ll hit with   white vinegar for a sour component. It kinda  hurts my brain, because I’m pretty sure I’ve   read the Treaty of Tordesilla right… but there  might just be a possible indirection connection,   and that’s the Chinese of Southeast Asia. Because historically the Macanese people,   they weren’t usually the product of unions  between Portuguese and Cantonese. The Qing   dynasty they forbade that, so Portuguese  they’d marry down south in Malacca and   then bring their wives up to Macau –  and often, those wives were Peranakan,   themselves a mix of Chinese and Malay. And of  course, there was also a ton of contact amongst   the entire Portuguese trading empire… ships going  back and forth to from Macau to Malacca, Goa,   and points beyond. So in a lot of ways, Macanese  food is equally if not more part of this network. So for this specific dish I don’t know why,  but once you know what you’re looking for in   pockets across Southeast Asia Baader Meinhoff  really begins to set in – Philippines, Myanmar,   and most critically for us Malaysia… where there’s  a Kristang, Malacca Portuguese, dish called Kari   Porku Tambrinhyu. And these influences they will  be important for us to try to recreate this today,   because while there are resources out there  for Macanese food… most of the recipes are or   are closely based off of historical recipes. Now if you’ve never worked from historical   recipes before, what you have to understand is  that you cannot charge into historical recipes   blind. You have to have to interpret them,  because they’ll usually leave out a bunch of   little steps that the writer would’ve found to be  self-obvious. These days recipes are functionally   like little classes to teach people how to cook  – in the past, on average people kinda already   knew how to cook so recipes instead were a  lot more like… chef’s notes. For example,   I think for a lot of you watching if I told you  that my Mac N Cheese is a bechamel Mac N Cheese,   two parts American, one part cheddar, a touch of  parm, then baked with some seasoned breadcrumbs,   time or another culture, it definitely trip you  up. So then now take a look at this Tamarind   Pork recipe, courtesy the excellent Macanese  library – a great source, more on them later…   it instructs us to add ¼ cup of tamarind that’s  been soaked beforehand. If you followed those   specific words on that specific page literally,  you’re gunna have a bad time – it’s assumed that   you already know that you should soak solely the  pulp of the tamarind, you should know the correct   concentration of pulp to water, and of course  that you should discard the strings and seeds.  Then, the second thing with historical  recipes that’s crucial to understand   is that ingredients in the past were different  from ingredients today. Almost universally so,   but most fundamentally, meat. After all, all  meat was farm meat, it got more exercise,   so cuts were both tougher and they were more  flavorful. Like, I can’t seem to find it,   but I distinctly remember this one thread  on r/askculinary where someone got fancy all   natural happy-enough farm chicken for the first  time in their life, and the flavor freaked them   out so much they thought the chicken had gone  bad. We’re just working off of different animals.   So in these recipes, a lot of them they’ll call  for pork leg – presumably because they want a   mix of fat and lean, but you use leg with  modern pork, especially outside of China,   the end result is going to be dry. What  we’ll need to use is shoulder. If you can   get a shoulder like this with the fat and skin  included that’s great, but today we’ll be using   the internationally available Boston Butt for  the lean and pork belly for the fat component. This combination is going to give us a result  closer to the historical dish than if we followed   the recipe blind, but – it’s also important to  activate your own personal kitchen common sense.  I know that if I braised a bunch of pork that’s  this fatty I’m gunna wind up with a massive   layer of grease that’s floating on top. But when  we ate this thing in Macau there wasn’t a big   layer of grease, I don’t know what the restaurant  does, but at least for my tastes I’m gunna have   to do something. Now I could just call for lean,  but I did want that lard and richness so I decided   to take a little inspiration from that Filipino  video from before. There, they first render out   the grease before they cook everything together,  which to be clear I’ve never seen from a Macanese   recipe, but I think it’s a smart idea to help  control the final fat content of the stew. So then, I’ll take 250 grams of pork belly and cut  it into thick strips, together with any obvious   fatty bits from my half kilo of Boston Butt.  Sprinkle over an eighth teaspoon salt, mix, then   coat with a tablespoon of oil, and add to a cool  pot together with a quarter cup of water… and over   a medium flame slowly begin to render out that  lard. And as that’s rendering, we’ll then mix the   rest of the lean with an 1/8 tsp salt, an 1/8 tsp  white pepper powder, a half tablespoon of light   soy sauce, a half teaspoon of dark soy sauce,  another half tablespoon brandy, and coat it all   with a bit of oil… and marinate that as the lard’s  rendering out, which’ll take about a half an hour.  And… after that time, this’s what we’re looking  at here. We won’t want to take it all the way to   crisp, a bit of fat’s still good but now we’ve got  a lot of lard here to work with. So we’ll use some   So then, to finally make our Porco Balichao  Tamarindo… to three tablespoons worth of our   rendered lard, we’ll start by frying the  marinated pork on high. Once it’s roughly   browned, remove it and add that together  with the browned rendered belly. Then,   we’ll go in with one onion very finely minced, let  that sweat over medium-high for about two minutes   and once you can hear frying sounds again, toss  in five cloves of equally finely finely minced   garlic. Fry for another minute, then we’ll  scooch those to the side… adding another   tablespoon lard if you need, and then go in  with three tablespoons of our shrimp paste. Now again, the old recipes for  Balichao are basically that sort   of fermented shrimp plus these. For some  Balichao applications, for example this   do the same move as the diaspora and let that  all sit together for a month. But because this   is a stew, and it doesn’t go that heavy on the  flavor we are going to have more flexibility. I   chose to go straight Filipino Bagoong Alamang and  incorporate these elements to the braise itself   but you can also make your own judgement call.  Also, final aside, in my personally opinion,   I do think for this dish you could also use the  more internationally available Cantonese shrimp   paste as well. It’s a little different but  still good, I’ve done it before… but if going   that route just use one tablespoon here as the  Cantonese sort is saltier and more concentrated.  So, then together with that I went with  four dried bay leaves, two whole cloves,   a half teaspoon of red chili powder… then fry  that together for about a minute and mix. Then,   we’ll go in with two tablespoons of brandy…  let that all evaporate away until pasty,   then add back in the pork. Add enough water  to just almost submerge, and bring to a boil.  Then, we’ll go in with a half teaspoon chicken  bouillon powder, an optional teaspoon of lemon   zest, 40 grams of jaggery or dark brown sugar,  and two teaspoons of dark soy sauce. The reason   for the dark soy sauce is because I imagine that  the historical recipes – being a part of this   trading network – would probably have been using  palm jaggery, which’ got a much deeper color than   this kind of Chinese cane jaggery, so the dark  soy can split the difference. But either way,   we’ll then just let that braise for two hours. and  as that’s braising then, we can soak our  tamarind. This here is just a bit of pure   tamarind pulp – about one tablespoon worth –  that we soaked in with a quarter cup of hot,   boiled water. Just let that soak as the pork  is simmering, then strain it into a bowl. So then after that time, for the stew this’s  what we’re looking at. Now I want this to be   a bit thick like the restaurant, so I’ll swap  the flame to medium high and let that rapidly   reduce. Once you’re looking at something  that’s starting to appear like a sort of   ‘curry-like’ consistency – add in that  sour tamarind liquid, and I like doing   half of it first and adding the remainder  to taste as tamarind can be powerful stuff.   You’ll be looking for the dish to have  a minor sweet sour sort of element,   but not so sour that it puckers your lips. Then,  add in your seasoning, up here on the screen, and   optionally finish with a bit more of that rendered  lard together with a couple of fresh chilis. But… it’s not just the dish itself but also way  that it was served that’s really quite cool.   Now in my life, personally, in Guangdong at expat  potlucks and the like there was often this dynamic   where a lot of us would make these American dishes  or these fusion-y dishes for eachother and it’d   often be people’s Cantonese Sos or spouses  that end up actually frying the vegetables   to complete the meal. I dunno maybe the  Macanese had something similar going on,   because often for vegetables they’d serve things  alongside a Cantonese-style stir fried veg.  But really interesting is the starch that  was served alongside this specific dish,   something called pressed rice. Now I’ve never  personally seen anything like this before – it’s   basically rice cooked with scallion lard and  then… I mean, ‘pressed’ and cut into wedges. To make it, first fry the minced white part of one  scallion in with two tablespoons of lard that we   rendered off before for one or two minutes, then  add in 300 grams of thoroughly rinsed rice. Mix,   then toss in enough water to get about 2cm above  the rice and cover. With the flame on medium,   allow that to cook for twenty minutes,  then swap the flame to low and cook for   another ten. Then heat off to allow  it to steam for a final ten minutes,   and after that time mix in the green bits of  the scallion we used before. Then just toss   it on a plate, and first press the  rice down flat as much as feasible,   and then go around and make a little dome. Then  just repeat those moves about three or four times,   or until the rice is obviously bonded together,  and then slice those wedges. Serve along with the   pork and the vegetable, being sure to use  that rice to sop up all of the tamarind sauce. So now… there’s always something a little  nerve wracking covering Macanese cuisine   because as you can tell we’re obviously not  Macanese. Now that usually doesn’t stop us,   but with this kind of endangered dish  there’s this nagging sense of like… “what   if I was wrong, what if my judgement calls  were totally off?” There’s an uncertainty   margin baked into the cake, so definitely  don’t take my recipe today here as gospel.   Definitely do check out the aforementioned  Macanese library, where in addition to more   information on the Macanese people you can  find hundreds and hundreds of unadulterated   historical Macanese recipes. My personal favorite  collection is from someone called Guilly… her   cooking instincts really bleed onto the page,  she localized a lot, and… I dunno. Back during   COVID lockdowns when it wasn’t super comfortable  being a foreigner here I… I found a lot of comfort   going through those recipes…. Anyway, they’re  really cool so I do hope you can check them out. But again, I’m obviously very not Macanese so  if you want to learn about the general context   of this food I cannot recommend this book highly  enough – The Making of Macau’s Fusion Cuisine by   Annabel Jackson. It’s really valuable sociological  work, we’ve learned a ton… and! If you’ll notice,   this copy is in Chinese, and if you zoom… zoom  and enhance on the translators you can find…   our very own Stephanie Li, who was the lead  translator for all the food related chapters. And if you happen to be watching this video  in the first week that it’s coming out, and   you happen to be living in Hong Kong on July  16th, 6:30pm, Annabel but also Steph they’ll   be giving a talk at the Hong Kong book fair.  So you can join me in the audience if you want,   more info in the notes below… written recipes  of course down in the linked Substack post,   and of course, subscribe for  more Chinese cooking videos.