For my first post about eating lunch specials at Red Jade, it would only be fitting to talk about what I used to only get, and to this days still sits at the top of the tier list.
Spicy Salted Spare Ribs (椒鹽排骨 Jiao1 Yan2 Pai2 Gu3) is a two part artery nightmare. Salt marinated spare ribs that are firstly deep fried, then secondly tossed in a hot wok with some aromatics.
- Honey, I need to tell you something. They don't use spare ribs in the western-butchering sense. They use loins and cuts from the end of the rib cage, both with the chine (aka spine bone) still attached. That's not to say it's false advertising, but a translation with some misleading context. This is a fairly common cut, referred to by the chine 排骨 (pai2 gu3). My educated guess why chose to call it spare ribs is because it is, well, a spare part of the main long-boned cut of the rib, which we would call 肋排 (le4 pai2, rib cage bone) instead.
- Lightly breaded with potato starch but without egg wash. After breading, they tend to let them sit for a couple minutes, where the starch will absorb some of the liquid from the meat and create a seal. Keeps the meat tender by locking in the moisture, and on the outside you still get a bit of crisp.
- Once they deep fry the spare ribs, they get a quick trip in a hot wok with S&P, along with some garlic, green onion, dried chili, and fresh jalapeños. I love the use of jalapeños in American Chinese food. Another dish I adore with the use of jalapeños is the steamed spare ribs at Big Lantern. Spare ribs + Jalapeños, name a better duo.
Biting through the crispy skin allowing the juice to come out is absolutely satisfying. The taste of the marinated meat follows immediately, with the aromatics complimenting it. It runs a bit salty, as intended, with the mild heat from the jalapeño keeps one from wanting more right away. The best way to describe it in Chinese is 爽 (Shuang3, or it's feel fucking good)
This is a fairly sauceless dish (read: there's no sauce at all), and with Red Jade's lack of portion control on the rice means there's a lotta rice. The spare ribs are great own their own, but having it with just steam rice is a bit monotonous. So I would happily pay the extra 3 dollaroos to upgrade to fried rice for a triple artery threat.
Their fried rice checks all my boxes for a good baseline fried rice: Wok hei ✔, soy sauce and egg fragrance from the wok hei ✔, MSG ✔, and it being Lily Fleming ✔ (aka 粒粒分明, where every grain of rice is visible and not clumping, coined by the owner of WenWen in Brooklyn).
This dish takes me back to my high school days at the Compost Alley, a name that describes a small stretch of restaurants mainly catering to commuting students, serving incredibly cheap meals that's not all that terrible but sometimes questionably unsanitary. I would get thing get a red braised spare rib the size of my face topped on a container of fried rice, for a mere 50NTD ($1.60USD), and scarf down the whole thing in 20 minutes before cram school starts on Tuesdays nights.
Perhaps it's the nostalgia, perhaps it's just my primal instinct guiding me to consume very condensed calories, I'd like to say the salted spicy spare ribs is Red Jade's prized heavy hitter: so heavy that I usually split the meal into 2 servings to avoid food coma, but also that it packs the weight of well deep fried meat, even while being hit with heat a second time in the wok, punching up against its opponents that would cost double of what their serving, for just the price of a tener and a few quarters. 🛵
Read about other Lunch Specials I ate at Red Jade.
