Twice-cooked pork

Twice cooked pork (simplified Chinese: 回锅肉; traditional Chinese: 回鍋肉; pinyin: Huí Guō Ròu; Jyutping: wui⁴ wo¹yuk⁶; literally "return pot meat"; also called double cooked pork) is a Sichuan-style Chinese dish. The dish's ingredients include pork, which is simmered, sliced and stir fried, and commonly stir fried vegetables such as cabbage, bell peppers, onions, or scallions with a sauce that may include Shaoxing rice wine, Hoisin sauce, soy sauce, sugar, ginger, chili bean paste and tianmianjiang bean paste.

Preparation

The process of cooking twice cooked pork involves first simmering pork belly steaks in water with spices, e.g. slices of ginger, cloves, star anise, jujubes and salt. After refrigeration to firm the meat, next it is then cut into thin slices. The pork is then returned to a wok and shallow fried in oil, usually along with some vegetables. The most common vegetables to accompany the pork are napa cabbage, bell peppers or scallions. Another simple way of preparing this dish is to cook the meat by itself until it is done, then fry it along with the other ingredients; however, an alternative method involves frying the meat by itself until cooked, then frying the vegetables separately for a while, and finally frying everything together.

In recent years, as Sichuan Cuisine develops, some modern preparation technique is introduced, especially the standard cooking sauce. The traditional preparation methods for double-cooked pork requires many ingredients such as chili broad bean paste and other spices. The new standard cooking sauce for double-cooked pork is manufactured in factories and put almost all ingredients into one simple cooking sauces, which will replace chili broad bean paste, salt, sugar and etc. With the modern industrial manufacturing process, the cooking sauce simplifies the preparation process and reduces the burden of precise measuring of ingredients.

There are many brands and products in the market for Twice cooked pork such as Wong's and Shengchubao. You can easily purchase these from Amazon.com, some specialty online retailer such as spicyelement.com or local Chinese grocery stores.

History

The Sichuan people are said to have a tradition of enjoying a feast every 1st and 15th of lunar months, with this dish as the main course. How the dish was developed is not as clear as Mapo Tofu, but it has been quite popular in Sichuan at least since Qin Dynasty.