The protein is a movable feast, however you could probably even make this dish from battered Mars bars if you wanted, because the important thing is the sauce. It’s sturdy enough to maintain some crunch on the plate, and thick enough to keep the meat within tender – and, most importantly, completely delicious. Far more successful is Steph and Chris’s triple coat of starch, which starts by dusting the meat with cornflour to help the batter stick, before dunking it into a “nice, thick” flour-and-egg mixture, and finishing off with a final layer of cornflour to “get that classic sort of gulurou shape and texture”. Given that the pork will be tossed in the sauce before serving, it’s important to make the batter robust enough to survive a dunking Solomon’s whisked egg-white coating, while almost tempura-like in its lightness, collapses into a soggy mess when it hits the wok. You could skip the initial fry and blanch the pork first instead, as the Zhangs suggest, but that’s a bit of a faff, and I think has a tendency to make the meat slightly tough. Slimmers stop reading now: though you can find recipes, like that from Ching He Huang, which simply stir-fry the meat, this is not health food – most sweet and sour pork is deep-fried, often doubly so, to make it “very crisp”, as Solomon puts it. I don’t think you need to add any sugar at this point, because the sauce will be sweet anyway, but testers do enjoy the warmth of Chinese five spice in the recipe in Charmaine Solomon’s Complete Asian Cookbook. Loin might not need much in the way of tenderising, but a brief marinade will always add flavour we particularly like the garlicky soy mixture used by Amy and Julie Zhang in their Dumpling Sisters Cookbook. Chunks seem only appropriate for chicken, but I can’t explain why.” Having chewed my way through the great Ken Hom’s mighty 5cm cubes of fatty pork neck, I can explain why: chicken is a softer meat, pork has more heft to it. Some of my testers find them a bit fiddly, however, so I’m going to stick with loin, though I would urge anyone who doesn’t mind getting up close and personal with some bones to give them a try (get your butcher to chop them up first they’re pretty hard on the old cleaver).Ĭut the meat nice and small Anglo-Chinese food writer Lizzie Mabbott muses: “I would go with pork shoulder strips. To my surprise, however, the spare ribs used in Kei Lum and Diora Fong Chan’s China: The Cookbook work much better, the meat remaining soft and juicy, while the bony bits are little more than vehicles for batter. At most restaurants nowadays, you’ll see this with lean meat, though, and we do prefer it here.” I’m inclined to agree: the edge of the fat on the pork belly used by Yan-Kit So in her Classic Chinese Cookbook goes deliciously crisp in the fryer, but the rest becomes annoyingly chewy belly is a cut better slow cooked. Though it can be tailored to just about any protein you like, I think the juicy texture of pork works particularly well in this dish and, according to YouTubers Steph and Chris of Chinese Cooking Demystified, “older variants… use pork belly instead of loin.
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