pork hocks with vinegar and ginger
The way I do this is so simple. I'll add notes at the end about some of the traditional recipes I've seen and the extra work they ask of you.
My Recipe
Put about 1 1/2 kg pork hocks in a large pan. Peel about 1 kg of fresh ginger and cut it into 2 cm pieces. Peel a head of garlic, and cut any really big cloves in half. Pour 7 cups of cider vinegar plus 1 cup of malt vinegar over the pork hocks. Add more cider vinegar if this doesn't cover the meat. Drop in the ginger and garlic, and bring it to the boil. Add 1/2 cup of sugar, and stir until it's dissolved. Turn down the heat to a gentle simmer. Cook until the pork is tender (about 2 hours, maybe up to 4, depending on the cut of the meat). The vinegar will reduce to a thick dark syrup, but if it looks like it's going too fast, just add more vinegar.
That's it. You can eat the pieces of ginger, as well as the pork (the garlic will probably have disintegrated into the sauce, but if you found a piece, you could eat that, too). Trust me! *g*
If patience is your virtue, allow it to cool. Then re-heat, serve, and enjoy it even more because the flavours have blended and mellowed. I usually eat some straight up, but I do enjoy the second round more.
Notes
Hocks? Anything from the lower half of a pig's leg will do. Hocks/shanks are easy to get here, and they're meaty. Trotters/knuckles would make for a more unctuous, gelatinous sauce. Mmmm... I'm tempted.
Larger or smaller quantities of meat? Adjust the vinegar quantities to be sure it covers the meat when you start.
Ginger: if it's young, pink and tender, leave the pieces quite large - say up to 5 cm (and perhaps use even more than a kg). The older, drier and tougher it is, the smaller you should cut it (or you'll complain that I lied when I said it would be edible).
The garlic is not a traditional ingredient. I add it for the best of all possible reasons - I like it that way.
I use a bit more sugar than I've seen in other recipes (1/4 cup). I think of that as re-balancing the sweet/sour, because I can't easily get the traditional vinegars. The traditional vinegar mix would be sweet rice vinegar (6 cups) plus Chinese brown vinegar (2 cups). I like the cider vinegar, but you could use a white wine vinegar instead. I use less of the malt vinegar because the flavour is so aggressive.
Traditional recipes ask you to par-boil the pork first. Not necessary, in my opinion, with the quality of the meat we get here, but if you wanted to, you'd boil it for around half an hour. And you'd boil the ginger and sugar in the vinegar for around half an hour, before adding the pork.
Traditionally, peeled hard-boiled eggs are added after the meat is cooked. Then it's allowed to cool and re-heated before serving. Cooling and re-heating is a good idea, but I don't bother with the eggs.