Once you’ve seen how pork floss is made, you’ll probably be much less suspicious of it. It seems quite simple: add a huge pile of boiled and shredded pork meat into a vat, then slowly dry fry, stirring constantly so that the pork doesn’t stick to the bottom of your vat. No weird additives (apart from that full bottle of soy sauce), no strange technique as you’d expect from a meat dish that is as light and fluffy as fibreglass insulation.
As for fried pork skin, a Northern Thai staple, it is a two stage frying process. Pork skin is cut into fine shreds, warmed (and rendered for lard (?)) in a cooler fryer, followed by a few seconds in a hotter fryer to puff up the pork skin shreds en masse.
If you’re keen to make your own pork floss, Umami has a pork floss recipe.
WEIRD. If there were ever a barrel I’d want to scrape, it would be one that included pork.
Thanks for the enlightening look into the process- though seeing how it’s made doesn’t really make me any more likely to order a sweet bun topped with it. -X
MMM two of my favourite things. Thanks for sharing. Don’t think I can be bothered making my own floss when the local Asian grocers are full of the stuff.
I agree that pork floss is one of the few foods that I think you’d receive no extra gratification from making it yourself rather than just buying it.
Before living in Cambodia I hated the stuff, but for some reason (possibly, much rice porridge) I came around.
the fried pork skin/lard is lovely. very lovely