This braised pork belly dish in sweet vinegar sauce is one of our favorites! It’s very easy to make, very little hands-on time, and most importantly it is absolutely delicious! It is a dish you need to cook a lot of rice to go with!
Sweet and sour pork?
Some people may call this sweet and sour pork too! But unlike the Cantonese version Gu Lou Yuk, this is a braised version. Since we don’t usually deep fry food at home, and Gu Lou Yuk needs to deep fry, personally I like this braised pork belly in sweet vinegar sauce more! There are fewer to prepare, easy to make, while the pork belly is cooking, you can cook other dishes!
In Hong Kong, we always say sweet and sour food is very popular. Everyone likes these flavors, but I am very picky with the sourness that I like. I am usually not a huge fan of vinegar, I prefer the lemon kind of sourness, but the sweetness of the brown sugar has made the vinegar not so pungent.
If you think pork belly is too greasy, you can also use pork ribs instead! Sometimes I feel like the original traditional way of doing this dish is even with the ribs instead of pork belly. In our household, we are too lazy to deal with bones, so we prefer using the pork belly instead of ribs. (It’s not so healthy…but once in a while, let’s do it!)
Updated version
We posted another version in the past (Braised pork in sweet-vinegar sauce), with this new edition we cut the meat into bigger chunks. We feel the texture of the meat is more tender in this version than the other one.
Another most important change is the method to make this sauce. This time we use the 1-2-3-4 method. The amount of vinegar is a bit less, and we omit the light soy sauce, but the taste is still perfect. The last time we used stab sugar, feel free to keep that instead of using brown sugar, for this recipe, it’s interchangeable.
Braised Pork Belly in Sweet Vinegar sauce
Ingredients
- 300 g Pork Belly can be increased to 500g
- 2 cloves Garlic
- 1 Ginger about the size of a thumb
- 1 tbsp Chinese cooking wine preferably Shaoxing wine
- 2 tbsp Chinkiang vinegar or known as Zhenjiang vinegar
- 3 tbsp Dark soy sauce
- 4 tbsp Brown sugar
Instructions
- Smash the garlic briefly.
- Peel the ginger and slice them.
- Cut the pork belly in chunks.
- On medium-high heat, put the pork belly in a pot.
- When oil starts coming out of the pork belly, throw in the garlic and ginger as well.
- Sear all sides of the pork belly until a little bit golden.
- Add the seasoning, start with cooking wine, then soy sauce, vinegar, and brown sugar at last.
- Once it starts to boil, reduce the heat to low. Cover it with a lid and braise for 1 hour.
- Flip the pork belly occasionally so the color looks more even on the meat.
- When the time is up, it's ready to serve.
