Dongbei Pork

Pork in a thick potato-starch batter, fried twice and tossed in a clear sweet-sour sauce.

Pork. Not vegetarian — contains pork.

Ingredients

• 500 g pork loin, in 5 mm slices
• 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 120 g potato starch
• 150 ml cold water
• 1 litre vegetable oil, for deep frying
• 1 carrot, in fine shreds
• a thumb of ginger, in fine shreds
• 2 spring onions, in fine shreds

Sauce

• 5 tablespoons rice vinegar
• 5 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons water

Method

1. Toss the pork with the wine and salt and leave it 15 minutes.
2. Stir the potato starch into the cold water and leave it 20 minutes. It will settle into a solid layer with water on top; pour most of that water off and stir what is left into a batter like thick cream. Potato starch, not cornflour — it is what gives this its particular brittle shell.
3. Stir the sauce ingredients together until the sugar dissolves. It should taste aggressively sour: the batter will blunt it.
4. Coat each slice of pork thickly in the batter.
5. Heat the oil to 160C and fry the slices in small batches for 3 minutes, separating any that stick. Lift them out onto a rack.
6. Bring the oil to 190C and fry them again for 60 seconds, until the shells are hard and pale gold.
7. Pour all but a tablespoon of oil out of the pan. Add the carrot, ginger and spring onion for 20 seconds, pour in the sauce, and let it boil hard for a minute until it turns syrupy and clear.
8. Add the pork, toss fast for 15 seconds, and serve at once. Left to sit in the sauce the shell softens within a couple of minutes, which is why this is the last thing cooked.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under China · All recipes