Chinese Sweet and Sour Pork Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What are the ingredients for 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, or guō bāo ròu, is one of the dishes served in American Chinese restaurants that doesn't have its roots in Cantonese cooking. Instead, it's from the colder climes of northeastern China, in a city called Harbin in Heilongjiang province.

While sweet and sour can be found in diverse forms in China, the American version builds upon the simple mixture of sugar, vinegar, and spices with the addition of fruit juice—most commonly pineapple—and ketchup, giving the sauce both its red hue and uniquely Western flavor.

Swap the pineapples for these instead: the sourness with vinegar and the sweetness with sugar. Vinegar is just as sour as pineapples but without the sweetness. That can be remedied by using sugar. Both are an easy and simple ingredient substitutes that you already have!

This dish of deep-fried pork, often stir-fried with pineapple and bell peppers then covered in a brightly coloured sauce, is possibly one of the best-known Chinese dishes outside China. It is widely believed to be a Cantonese dish, and is called in the local dialect.

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.

A brine is essentially just salt and water. It helps prevent moisture loss during cooking, and the salt also helps tenderize the meat from the inside out. If you want an extra juicy piece of pork, brine it before cooking. You can make an effective brine just with salt and water, but additional seasonings do help.

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.

How do you make sweet and sour pork red? Restaurants often put a drop of red food coloring to brighten up the color of the dish. You can add this when mixing the sauce. If you don't mind a more natural color, the sauce will get its color from the ketchup and brown sugar.

Why doesn t Panda Express serve sweet and sour pork? ›

Panda hasn't made pork entrees in the US for a while because it is simply too expensive and not at all in demand. Think about it, when was the last time you had pork from a Chinese joint? However, Panda does serve Sweet & Sour Chicken.

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.

Sweet and sour sauce tastes just like it sounds. A little bit sweet and a little bit sour at the same time. You will also have notes from whatever you flavour it with. The sweet and sour tastes can be made with a simple sugar and vinegar mix.

Alternative Sweet and Sour Sauce

1 cup pineapple juice. 1/3 cup water. 3 tablespoons vinegar. 1 tablespoon soy sauce.

Lemon or lime juice are the two most common substitutes for white vinegar. You can also use rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar or malt vinegar but the taste of your sauce might be a tad different. Soy Sauce – I used low sodium.

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. Accept no substitutions!

Sweet and sour chicken, one of the most popular Chinese takeout dishes, is made of puffy, golden brown pieces of fried chicken nuggets with pineapple chunks, onion, bell pepper, carrot, and a side of iconic red, sweet and sour sauce.

If it's ground pork, it might be as the result of using/adding minced ginger and the resulting interaction with pork tends to make it a slightly pink hue. If it's traditional char siu(BBQ Chinese roasted pork), it's the combination of seasonings and spices (hoisin sauce, honey, five spice powder and red food dye).

Citric and Tartaric acids trigger an innate sour taste that is attractive to pigs while their pungency is smooth and remains unnoticed. The use of acids in pig production has merited a lot of research and an even higher amount of literature around it.