My grandmother’s babi chin recipe

Babi Chin, a classic Peranakan dish, features pork belly slowly braised in dark soy sauce, ground coriander, soybean paste, shallots and more. Simple to make yet bursting with complex flavours, it delivers a one-two punch of savoury richness and fragrant aromatics. It’s also my favourite dish made by my Po Po, and in many ways, the dish that taught me everything I know about food.

I was just a child when I first came across the dish. It was Chinese New Year, and while everyone—adults and kids alike—waited eagerly to see what my grandmother had prepared, I was a little disappointed, and possibly a little horrified, to see that one of the dishes was this amorphous mass of black. “Boy ah, try this,” my Po Po said as she took a piece of babi chin and placed it on my plate. That was when I took a sniff of it and decided that I would never again come near this dish. Many aspects about it repulsed me: the colour, the foul-smelling bamboo shoots, the pungent soybean paste and so ...