Pork Coppa Chashu Recipe
No matter how much I obsess over perfecting my ramen broth, it’s always my chashu that has folks asking questions.
Drawing influence from both Eastern and Western cooking, my pork chashu recipe is perfect for light-bodied ramen. It uses my favorite cut — pork coppa — and is cooked at a low temperature to give it a luxurious look and mouthfeel. It’s also straight-up tasty, so I’ve served it at pop-ups in both San Francisco and Philadelphia.
My pork coppa chashu, which I developed over multiple months through my iterative recipe development process, aims to balance a familiar chashu taste with pops of western influence. Infused with flavors of red wine and rosemary, this “rare” chashu is perfect for adding character and a beautiful pop of pink to your bowl of ramen. It also makes a mean pork sandwich!
The Pork
This chashu uses pork coppa — a prized piece of meat derived from the pig’s neck. Coppa is gorgeous, delicate, and (when prepared right) tender. It features a stunning mosaic of fat that makes for excellent chashu when cooked over a long period of time at low temperatures and then sliced thinly.
Coppa is rarely for sale labeled as coppa, but it’s not hard to buy. If your butcher doesn’t sell the coppa cut, there are a few things you can do:
Make friends with that butcher! I had an amazing butcher in Philadelphia that began selling coppa at my request.
Try telling your butcher that you’re going to cure your own capicola. For whatever reason, this has worked for me with multiple butchers. Capicola also uses the coppa cut.
Order a full Boston butt. This common cut contains the full coppa, and there are many YouTube videos on how to remove the coppa from a Boston butt. Some butchers will even sell you particular parts of the Boston butt, so you can essentially buy just the coppa if you’re good at describing where you want the butcher to divide.
Order échine de porc: If you have a French butcher, you can order the échine cut, which is close enough.
Once I’ve acquired my coppa, I remove any thick pieces of fat from the outside of the cut. This helps to give the finished chashu a rounder shape, too.
The Equipment
1. Sous vide equipment: This pork is cooked rare — just enough for eating it to be safe. That's hard to do confidently in an oven. To do so, I use my Breville Joule.
Sous vide also enables us to infuse the pork with the taste of rosemary. If we had cooked this in a brine like regular chashu, the rosemary taste would not have been as prominent.
You’ll also need a container with a lid (to prevent water evaporation during the long cook) and a gallon-sized freezer bag.
2. Meat carving knife: We’ll need to slice the pork very thinly to take advantage of the fat’s luxurious mouthfeel. I purchased this inexpensive long meat carving knife for this purpose. After briefly freezing the pork, I cut it with this knife in one fluid motion to create thin slices of porky goodness.
3. Pink salt #1: To give the pork its beautiful pink color, we’re going to briefly cure it with pink salt. Make sure you are using #1 not #2!
The Ingredients
Depending on how thin you slice it, this is probably enough for 20 pieces of chashu.
Pork coppa (2 pounds, ideally tied with twine)
Rosemary (2 sprigs)
Garlic cloves (2)
Salt
Pink salt
Red wine (such as a bordeaux)(1 cup)
Mirin (1 cup)
Soy sauce (1 cup)
Balsamic vinegar (1/4 cup)
Brown sugar (6 tbsp)
Cracked black pepper
The Steps
This takes about a day, but most of it is idle time.
Combine 20g salt with 4g pink salt.
Coat the outside of the pork with this salt mixture. Let the pork rest in the refrigerator uncovered for 6 hours. This is lightly curing the pork to give it the pink color.
Create marinade by simmering 1 cup red wine, 1 cup mirin, 1 cup soy sauce, and 2 tbsp brown sugar until the alcohol burns off, about 10 minutes at a light simmer. Add 2 cups cold water and 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar.
Coat pork in brown sugar (around 4 tbsp), then sear the pork in a pan with canola oil. The goal is to caramelize the sugar and brown the outside of the pork while leaving the inside of the pork rare.
Add two crushed garlic cloves and two branches of rosemary to ziploc bag. Add coppa to the bag with the marinade then sous vide at 140f for 3 hours.
Rapidly chill the coppa by putting the bag into a cold water bath, then store it in the fridge — marinade and all. I recommend leaving the coppa in the marinade for 1 day, but it is fine to leave it there for a couple days longer.
The day you are serving, remove the coppa from the marinade and lightly pepper the outside.
To slice the coppa, put it in the treezer for one hour. This will firm up the outside, enabling you to slice it very thin. Slice very thin!
Store the sliced coppa in the fridge in the marinade until one hour prior to serving. Bring to room temperature to serve in your ramen.
