Char Siu

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Julia Moskin, Chinese-Style Ribs at Home; I dreamed of recreating a version of cha siu I loved in childhood. New York Times, July 11, 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/ ... reribs-at-home.html

Note:
(a)
(i) So far the cn.nytimes.com has not translated it.
(ii) The surname Moskin means child (suffix kin) of Moshe (Hebrew for Moses).
(b) "In any city,  a promising sign [for] a serious Cantonese food zone is a siu laap 烧腊: a storefront dedicated to roasted and cured meat. * * * Siu mei 烧味, or 'fork burned' meat, is a particular specialty of Guangdong (formerly called Canton) * * * especially cha siu 叉烧, the juicy, red-tinged, salty-sweet pork that routinely tops bowls of ramen in Japan and fills banh mi sandwiches in the many Little Saigons of the United States."
(c) "Carolyn Phillips, a historian of Chinese cuisine, said siu mei was traditionally made by experts in the capital city, Guangzhou, who hung the big pieces of meat on hooks in large coal- or wood-fired ovens so the heat could flow evenly around them. 'Traditional Chinese kitchens don't have ovens,' she said, 'so the meat master would make roasted meats that couldn't be cooked at home.'  In other words, siu mei is something food lovers buy, not make — much like charcuterie in France, pit barbecue in the American South and Central European deli meats like pastrami and corned beef."

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(d) "The food writer Diana Kuan * * * said that if siu mei has a fuchsia rather than a scarlet hue, skip it. * * * [in other words: 'if] it was magenta, not red' — the sure sign of cutting corners with food coloring.
(i) fuchsia (color)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsia_(color)
(ii) magenta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magenta
(e) "Spareribs, an old-school egg roll and chicken with cashew nuts (extra water chestnuts, no celery, please) was my standing order at Chun Cha Fu [全家福 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan], a formal 'Mandarin' restaurant we visited weekly when I was young."

popoo (blogger's name)),《北美国立浙江大学通讯》稿件 2. Beijing: Bokee 博客网, Apr 10, 2006
oopoo.bokee.com/4849092.html
("浙大校友通讯，始于一九三五年在上海以手写油印本首行，时邰裴子代校长五十寿辰。 * * *
ALUMNI NEWS
* Chuan-Chih Hsiung (熊金治 1936，Math), Wen-Chin Yu (余文琴，1938 Physics) and their daughter Nancy went to Mainland China in 1975. * * *
* Kuan-Han Sun（孙观汉 1936, Chemical Eng.） has been engaged in nuclear research at Westinghouse Electric for many years. * * *
* William KY Tao(陶光荣 1941 Mechnical [sic] Eng.) has successfully established his firm, William Tao & Associates, the Consulting engineers, in St Loius [sic], Mo. * * *
* Thomas TL Chou(周德禄 1947 Electrical Eng.) teaches at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. * * *
* In-Meei Neou (纽因迈 1941 Mechnical Eng.) is a Professor in the Mechnical Engineering Department of West Virginia University at Morgantown. * * *
                                          NORTH  AMERICA
NATIONAL CHEKIANG UNIVERSITY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
                 FIRST  MEMBERSHIP  RE-UNION
      SEPTEMBER 4&5, 1976          NEW YORK CITY, U.S.A.

SATURDAY, SEPT. 4                           
CHUN CHA FU RESTAURANT(全家福)
BROADWAY BETWEEN 90&91 STS.
NEW YORK, NY    362-2200")

Bokee sounds like Cantonese pronunciation for 博客.
(f) "Replicating Cantonese spareribs in a modern kitchen is not difficult. But it demands some workarounds that may make purists uncomfortable.  Such as ketchup.  The red color of traditional cha siu comes from a creamy, funky bean paste called nan ru 南乳 [也叫  红腐乳]. Nan ru is tofu that is brined and fermented with rice that has been inoculated with a deep red strain of mold. Like Japanese miso, tofu-ru (the general term for aged tofu) can be ripened to many different levels of funkiness, and flavored with different grains and microorganisms, which turn colors —  like the blue streaks in Roquefort and the green veins of Gorgonzola — as ripening takes place.  (If we're sticking to the delicatessen model, you might say that if siu mei corresponds to deli meat, Asian techniques for tofu correspond to cheese; the tofu is curdled, aged, flavored and controlled in many of the same ways.)  Tofu-ru, like miso, fish sauce and dashi, evolved over centuries * * * the story of ketchup does begin in East Asia, as a salty-sweet, umami-rich fermented fish sauce called by some version of the name 'ke-jap.' ""
(i)
(A) funky (adj): "having an offensive odor : FOUL"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/funky
(B) funky (adj): "North American strongly musty   <cooked greens make the kitchen smell really funky>"
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/funky
(C) musty (adj; early 16th century: perhaps an alteration of moisty moist): "having a stale, mouldy, or damp smell  <a dark musty library>" http://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/musty
(ii)
(A) The microorganism responsible for 南乳 is a fungus called Monascus purpureus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monascus_purpureus

In contrast
stinky tofu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu
(section 1 Production: "Unlike cheese, stinky tofu fermentation does not have a fixed formula for starter bacteria; wide regional and individual variations exist in manufacturing and preparation")
(B) What red pigments does Monascus purpureus produce?  

Dikshit R and Tallapragada P, Monascus purpureus : A Potential Source for Natural Pigment Production. Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology Research, 1: 164-174 (2011l available online)
("Monascus species are known to produce well-known azaphilone pigments like monascorubrin [and] rubropunctatin * * * Monascorubrin and rubropunctatin have a unique structure responsible for their high-affinity for compounds with primary amino groups (so-called aminophiles). Reactions with amino acids yield the water-soluble red pigments, monascorubramine and rubropunctamine. In fact, various pigment derivatives with improved functional properties in the colour range of orange-red to violet-red can be produced by Monascus fermentations in the presence of different
amino acid [14]. However, Monascus-fermented rice has been found to contain the mycotoxin citrinin") (footnotes omitted except footnote 14)

, whose footnote 14 was
Jung H et al, Color Characteristics of Monascus Pigments Derived by Fermentation with Various Amino Acids. Journal of Agricultural and  Food Chemistry, 51: 1302-1306 )2003).
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jf0209387

* "Azaphilones are a class of fungal metabolites." from the Web.
* Because "violet-red" may be produced by Monascus, to say magenta char siu must mean artificial coloring is incorrect.
(C) Woo PCY et al, The Biosynthetic Pathway for a Thousand-Year-Old Natural Food Colorant and Citrinin in Penicillium marneffei. Scientific Reports, 4: 6728 (2014).
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep06728/

Quote:

"Monascorubrin and its related compounds are polyketides that have been used as natural red colorants for a wide range of food, such as red wines, tofu and meats for more than one thousand years in China, Japan and other Southeast Asian countries. The earliest known reference to use these red colorants was in a recipe for red pot-roast lamb, in which meat was simmered with hong qu (red rice koji, made with Monascus purpureus), recorded in the Qing Yilu [陶谷 (北宋), 清异录; English: Anecdotes, simple and Erotic] in AD 965. * * * The chemical pathway for monascorubrin biosynthesis has never been elucidated in any fungal species. Moreover, no genome sequence is available for any Monascus species. * * * Citrinin, another polyketide and mycotoxin with nephrotoxic activity in mammals, was found to be present in the cultures of many Monascus species, including M purpureus." (citations omitted).

"Due to its relatively fast growth rate, which is twice as fast as M purpureus, and the availability of genome sequence, it [Penicillium marneffei] is an ideal model fungus for fungal genetic studies." P Marneffei also produces red pigment monascorubramine.

* Japanese-English dictionary:
kōji 麹 【こうじ】 (n): "malt-like material from growing mold on rice, barley, beans, etc (used as a starter to make sake, miso, soy sauce, etc)"  (The kōji is Japanese pronunciation for kanji 麹.)
* PKS = polyketide synthase (synthase is an enzyme that makes, or synthesizes, polyketide)
* polyketide (n; etymology: "Early 20th century. From poly- + keto- + -ide): "an organic compound in which carbonyl groups alternate with single carbon atoms in a chain, thus: —CO—C—CO—C—" where
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/polyketide
, where "CO" is carbonyl group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonyl_group
* Please pay attention to Figure 5, where bottom row shows the chemical structures of monascorubrin (R=C7H15), rubropunctatin (R=C5H11), and products after reaction with amino groups ("Schiff base formation"). Please also take notice that the toxic citrinin is shown in the upper right corner of Fig 5.
* Both monascorubrin and rubropunctatin are red. I do not know the color after Schiff base formation.
* Tim Soderberg, 11.6A: Imines - the general picture. LibreTexts, undated
https://chem.libretexts.org/Text ... iological_Emphasis_(Soderberg)/11%3A_Nucleophilic_carbonyl_addition_reactions/11.6%3A_Imine_(Schiff_base)_formation
* The citrinin "was first isolated from Penicillium citrinum * * * the actual mechanism of citrinin toxicity is not entirely understood." from a 2014 journal.
(D) I have done some research on char siu, and still do not know whether 南乳 is to confer color, flavor or both.
(iii) Roquefort
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roquefort
(a sheep milk cheese; aged in caves of Roquefort-sur-Roquefort-sur-Soulzon)

Roquefort-sur-Soulzon s a commune on the stream "le Soulzon" of 10 km long. See sur (preposition; from Latin preposition super on): "on"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sur
(iv) Gorgonzola
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgonzola (made from unskimmed cow's milk n (town of) Gorgonzola, Milan)