Sweet & Sour Pork

Recipe from Lawrence C.C. Chu

Sweet, sour, pungent, and crunchy — an unbeatable combination. The secret to preparing this correctly is in the double-frying.

Yields:

6-8 servings

Time Required:

• 20 mins. cooking time

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cups Sweet & Sour Sauce (recipe below)
• 1 lb. (0.45 kg.) pork shoulder butt, boned, trimmed, and cut into ¾" cubes

Marinade

• 1 tsp.¹ (5 mL) dry sherry
• 1 tsp. (3 g) garlic powder
• ½ tsp. (3 g) salt
• Pinch Chinese five-spice²

Batter

• ½ cup (60 g) flour
• 1 cup (128 g) corn starch (US/Canada), aka cornflour (UK/other)³
• ¼ tsp. (1 g) baking powder
• 1 cup (235 mL) water
• 1 tsp. (5 mL) oil

• Vegetable oil, for deep-frying

Vegetables

• 1 bell pepper, seeded and cut into bite-size squares
• ¼ small white onion, cut in bite-size squares
• 5-6 thin slices carrot
• ½ cup (120 mL) pineapple chunks
• Cornstarch paste⁴

Preparation:

Prepare Sweet & Sour Sauce (recipe below) as directed.

Combine pork and MARINADE ingredients; let stand for 30 mins. Mix together BATTER ingredients until the consistency of heavy butt, boned, trimmed, and cream; let stand for 15 mins. Just before using, stir to mix; pour enough batter over pork to coat.

To deep-fry, heat 4 cups (945 mL) oil in a wok (or electric deep-fat fryer) to 325°F (163°C). Add half the pork, and cook for about 3 mins., or until a crust is formed. Repeat with remaining pork. Remove and drain. (You can do the above procedure ahead of time, if desired.)

To deep-fry again, remove any pieces of batter left in oil and raise temperature in wok to 350-375°F (175-190°C). Return pork and agitate (carefully shake) to separate. Deep-firy until golden brown; remove and drain oil in wok.

To hot mix, heat wok over high heat for 1 min. Add 3 Tbsp. (45 mL) oil and then sauce, VEGETABLES, and pineapple. Bring to a boil, and thicken with 2 Tbsp. (30 mL) cornstarch paste. Add pork, mix well, and serve.

Author's Notes

For variety, you can add lichee nuts, loquats, cherries, tomatoes, or other fresh fruits or vegetables to this recipe.

To retain the crunchy texture of the deep fried pork, it's important to "hot mix" quickly. You're trying to coat the pork, not cook it.

Sweet & Sour Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 orange
• 1 lemon
• 1 thumb-size chunk fresh ginger, crushed
• 1 cup (235 mL) ketchup⁵
• 1 cup (200 g) sugar
• ¾ cup (175 mL) distilled vinegar
• 2 cups (475 mL) water
• Pinch salt
• ¼ tsp. (1.2 mL) red food colouring (optional)
• ¼ tsp. (1.2 mL) yellow food colouring (optional)
• Cornstarch paste³

Preparation:

Squeeze juice from orange and lemon into a saucepan. Drop in rinds and ginger. Stir in ketchup⁴, sugar, vinegar, water, salt, and food colourings (if used).

Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmmer for 5 mins. Cool and then remove rinds and pieces of ginger.

Author's Notes:

When ready to use, pour as much sauce as needed into a saucepan. Heat to simmering, and add enough cornstarch paste to make the consistency of pancake syrup. (It thickens further as it cools.)

¹ Quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and fl. oz. are as defined in US Customary Units, not to be confused with differing British imperial, "legal", "coffee", Commonwealth of Nations, Canadian, Latin American, Japanese, Russian, or Dutch definitions — further proof that everyone needs the metric system.

² Five-spice powder, also called Chinese five-spice, is a strongly flavoured combination of ground anise, cinnamon, fennel, cloves, and Sichuan peppercorns.

³ "Corn starch" is powdered starch processed from the New World grain maize (from Spanish, orig. from Nahuatl), which grain the USA/Canada call "corn", unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, which reserves "corn" to mean cereal grains generically. This starch product, needed here in its customary role as a thickening agent, is called "corn starch" in the US/Canada, but "cornflour" in the UK and most other anglophone lands — not to be confused with whole maize grain: That product — not a thickening agent — is called "polenta", "corn meal", or "corn flour" in the US/Canada, depending on how finely milled, and called "maize flour" in the UK and most other places. Australians should beware that their "cornflour" is starch extracted from wheat kernel, sometimes more-helpfully labelled as "wheaten cornflour". As if that weren't confusing enough, the maize-based thickener may be labelled (in Australia) either as "corn flour" or as "corn starch", so beware. Further, the maize flour product, there, is labelled as "cornmeal".

Note that whole-maize grain is traditionally, in Meso-American cultures of origin, wisely soaked in alkaline solution ("nixtamalised") to increase bioavailability and thereby prevent niacin deficiency (pellagra), among other important benefits, yielding "masa" (lit. dough) aka "masa de maíz" (lit. maize dough), also available in dried & ground form as "masa harina" (lit. dough flour) aka "harina de maíz" (lit. maize flour), and in its unground form, hominy. As further complication, Americans distinguish "corn flour", meaning prepared from maize endosperm only, from "maize flour" for use of whole maize — the former, neutral-flavoured; the latter, much more nutritious.

Origin of the naming mess: Originally, North America shared with Mother England the language's original meaning of "corn" to mean cereal grains generically (from Old English "corn" meaning single seed of any cereal plant, orig. from Proto-Germanic "kurnam" meaning small seed). The colonists got the gift of maize from native peoples, therefore at first calling it "Indian corn". Later, in the USA and Canada, "Indian corn" got worn down to just "corn", while the original meaning of "corn" was lost, locally. "Maize" is thus now the least-ambiguous term in international contexts, though many Americans either don't know that word or reserve it for variants from Latin-American (and Spanish) cooking.

³ Cornstarch paste is a thin paste made from equal parts of cold water and corn starch. It is essential in many Chinese dishes (but be careful not to over-thicken. Stir just before using. Store covered in the refrigerator for 1 or 2 days.

⁵ Chu wrote "catsup", still in 1980 the predominant US spelling, thereafter (mostly) altered by corporate marketing to "ketchup" .

---

Taken from: Lawrence C.C. Chu's classic cookbook Chef Chu's Distinctive Cuisine Of China, p. 114. published 1980 by Harper and Row, which can be checked out in scanned format at Internet Archive. Thank you! (Chu's the chef / restaurateur of beloved local restaurant Chef Chu's, in Los Altos, California.)

Collected and re-published at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/recipes/sweet-and-sour-pork.html by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> on xxx. xx, 2026. Individual recipes are free from copyright. Share and enjoy!

(If I have any copyright title in my own very minor contributions to this page — not my intention — they were created in 2026 by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. I have thereby waived all copyright, compilation copyright, and related or neighbouring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States of America.)