Pork floss

Pork floss. Perverse, right? Say it out loud: “pork floss.” But the stuff itself just melts on your tongue.

I keep a pint of pork floss in my pantry, but I rarely cook with it. Not that you really cook with it; it’s a garnish. For me, it’s a snack, an umami microdose. Salty, savory, there-and-gone. A moment in my day. Flavor on demand.

MOPHO, New Orleans. My last back-of-house job. We made a killer som tam, which Chef Paul would finish with a few shreds of pork floss at the pass. This was my introduction to the meat product, but I only ever had a few shreds and marveled at it. Wow, I thought, how did they make cotton candy out of a pig?

What is pork floss? Well, I have a pint of Ching Yeh Pork Fu on hand, and I can tell you it’s packed by Formosa Food Company in Hull, Iowa. (The company just celebrated their 41st anniversary two months ago.)

Ingredients (from my pint in hand):

• Pork

• Sugar

• Soy flour

• Soysauce

• Lard

• Salt

• MSG

Basically, how it’s made (according to Serious Eats) is you cook pork, shred it, season the shreds, and fry over very low heat until dry. You’d never need to do this at home; the store-bought stuff is flawless and cheap. My pint came $3.99 from local favorite Good Neighbors Supermarket.

My longstanding favorite pork floss application is in the fan tuan at Win Son Bakery, a place I will almost certainly never patronize again due to the ever-present TikTok hordes on viral hajj. Like Formosa, Win Son is a Taiwanese company, and they use the former’s foodstuff. But the fan tuan, anyway, is divine — it’s basically a mini breakfast burrito, but with sticky rice instead of a tortilla, wrapped around a youtiao (like an unseasoned Chinese churro) softly fried egg, scallions, a bit of soy sauce, radish pickles, and a generous helping of pork floss.

Congee, the Chinese rice porridge, is as reliable a vehicle for toppings as a Honda Civic is for a prefrontal-cortex-developing high schooler. Failsafe. The last best bite of pork-floss-as-garnish I had was with the congee at Bonnie’s, the neo-Cantonese restaurant run by, as it happens, a former Win Son chef. Other toppings included a soft-boiled soy egg, ginger, scallions, and peanut crumble — with a full youtiao for dipping. Same stuff as the fan tuan, really, just a different treatment.

I can’t eat at Win Son Bakery ever again, and I can only eat at Bonnie’s occasionally, but I can sneak a pinch of pork floss from my pantry every day. It’s a guilt-free pleasure. There are 4 servings per pint, each 100 calories, 25mg of cholesterol, 520mg of sodium, 6g of sugar, 11g of protein, 6g of carbs, 3g of fat, and 1g of saturated fat. One pinch is about 10% of one serving, maybe less. I’ve had this one pint for months, and it’s still two-thirds full.

Pork floss. It’ll do in a pinch. Get the blue one; it’s better than the red one.