Chinese Sweet and Sour Pork Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What are the ingredients in sweet and sour pork? ›

How do you tenderise pork for stir fry? Velveting is a Chinese technique that helps keep meat tender during stir frying. Adding cornstarch and bicarb to your meat during the marinating process helps to coat your meat, giving it a velvety feel that makes the meat feel extra soft.

Sweet and sour pork is a Chinese dish particularly popular in Westernised Cantonese cuisine and may be found worldwide. Several provinces in China produce various dishes that claim to be the ancestor, including a traditional Jiangsu dish called “pork in a sugar and vinegar sauce” (糖醋里脊; pinyin: táng cù lǐjǐ).

Sweet and sour pork (咕噜肉) sits among some of the most well-known Chinese dishes outside of China. It's widely believed to be a Cantonese dish, known colloquially as gú lóuh yuhk, which roughly translates to “ancient pork.”

In a medium saucepan, combine pineapple juice, rice vinegar, brown sugar, ketchup, and soy sauce and bring to a boil over medium heat. Stir in cornstarch slurry and cook until thickened, about 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from heat and use immediately or store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

Cornflour/cornstarch – for thickening. Sweet and sour sauce is thicker than most stir fries so it clings to the pork pieces!

Boil the pork belly for about 5 minutes. This will remove a lot of the impurities from the pork and you will see a film of scum on the surface. Remove the pork belly and allow to cook on a plate or rack.

Then, if you want your pork to be extra tender, you can marinate it in a tenderizing marinade made with acids, like citrus juices, vinegar, or wine.

While there are several ways to velvet, a pound of meat needs about two teaspoons of cornstarch and two teaspoons of oil, says Leung. You may also include two to three tablespoons of water. For beef, add a 1/4-teaspoon of baking soda for tenderizing. Additional seasonings are optional and vary from recipe to recipe.

The story goes that this dish was created in Chencun, a town in Shunde district, but was originally made with ribs rather than diced pork. Visiting foreigners loved it, but disliked the bones, so chefs started to cook it with the well-marbled pork shoulder.

Is sweet and sour Chinese healthy? ›

Worst: Sweet and Sour Pork

It typically serves up 16 teaspoons of sugar, about the same amount in 3 chocolate bars. If that isn't bad enough, the syrupy sauce coats chunks of deep-fried pork. Even if you split this entree with someone, you're still likely to get more than 800 calories and 48 grams of fat.

The red hue on the pork comes from the sticky, crave-able barbecue sauce in which it's marinaded before roasting. Often, this deep crimson hue comes from a combination of Hoisin sauce, ketchup, soy sauce, and fermented red bean curd (aka fermented tofu, bean cheese, or tofu cheese).

Our host explains that shocking the freshly fried meat with ice helps to seal its crisp edges. The sweet and sour sauce that forms a thin glaze around the meat has a lovely rounded balance.

This dish called xiaosurou, or little crispy pork, is deep-fried fatty pork studded with plenty of numbing Sichuan pepper.

China

Sweet and sour pork / Origin

There are a few sweet pork recipes out there but I've found the best one to be this near-perfect imitation of Cafe Rio's sweet pork. The key ingredients are (besides pork, of course) Coca-Cola, brown sugar, chilis, enchilada sauce, and spices.

This sweet and sour chicken stir-fry is a version of the Asian-style favorite that includes carrots, bell pepper, garlic, and pineapple. The requisite soy sauce and vinegar add the sour to the sweet, and voila! Serve over hot cooked rice, if desired.

Sweet & Sour Pork Cantonese

ALLERGY Advice: This dish contains: Cereals Containing Gluten (wheat, rye, spelt, oats, kamut) Eggs Milk Sesame Sulphites & sulphur Dioxide (e.g. preservative food found in some dried fruit and wines) ..

However, it is believed that the sweet and sour pork dish was originally made with ribs rather than sliced pork. After eating the dish, these foreigners enjoyed it but didn't like the bones, so they modified the recipe, and chefs ditched the ribs and replaced it with a well-marbled pork shoulder.