In our perverse food system, I sometimes find things that used to be cheap cuts of meat like lamb shanks and brisket are more expensive than more tender cuts. So it was that I came to do this with a silverside joint. Don’t make that mistake: meat like that gets less tender with long cooking than the proper cuts like skirt and brisket. So I’ll do this again with the right cut.

It was nice though.

Red cooking is simmering meat in a mixture of dark soy, Chinese rice wine and water with some fresh ginger, garlic and a star anise added for flavour. Freeze the sauce – it is now a “Master Sauce” and you can either use all of it to cook something else, or use small amounts of it to enrich other gravies and sauces.

The picture shows the finished meal. I love anything salty and savoury and the sauce is definitely that. I put a little bit in a pan to thicken with cornflour to make a sauce, but it was too much for me. A couple of drops of chinese rice vinegar balanced it out nicely though.

The rice is plain medium-grained rice cooked by the absorbtion method without salt, and the veg is a mixture of what I had: Fennel, broccoli and mushrooms fried with onion, garlic, ginger, light soy and a little bit of five-spice