A few new students got their meals and found a table to sit down at.
The hot dishes on their plates looked incredibly appetizing. The fish-flavored shredded pork glistened with oil. The Sweet and Sour Pork Fillet was crystal clear and tender.
But the pièce de résistance was the Dongpo Meat.
A perfectly square piece of Dongpo Meat was uniformly a deep, soy-sauce red. This redness wasn't achieved by caramelizing sugar for color; it came from the cooking process of the meat itself. Most meats with a rich, rosy color involve a step of caramelizing sugar, but Dongpo Meat required none of it. The meat was also coated in juices. It had several layers. The top layer was translucent pork skin, followed by a layer of soft, sticky fatty meat that had absorbed the broth, and below that, a layer of firm lean meat. This piece of Dongpo Meat had been braised until it was extremely soft and tender. If you poked it with chopsticks, you could easily separate the pork skin and the soft, sticky fat.
