Jing Sauce Shredded Pork

Jing Sauce Shredded Pork is a classic of Beijing home and restaurant cooking, named for the city (京 = the capital) and for its defining seasoning, 甜面酱 — the fermented wheat-flour sweet sauce that anchors Beijing's table and dresses Peking duck. The dish belongs to the北方 family of 酱爆 (sauce-exploded) stir-fries, in which a thick fermented sauce rather than a thin liquid carries the flavor; its exact inventor and date are unrecorded, and the popular tale of a city-outskirts grandfather improvising it as a cheap stand-in for roast duck is folk narrative rather than documented history. What is certain is that it is built on two ordinary Beijing staples — pork loin and sweet flour-sauce — and on the local habit of wrapping savory fillings in tofu skin or a thin pancake, the same eat-by-rolling gesture used for Peking duck.

A good plate reads in three layers. The pork slivers are smooth and slippery, just firm, never dry or stringy, each one coated in a thin red-brown lacquer of sauce that tastes deeply savory-sweet with the toasty fermented note of the flour-sauce behind it. Against that comes the raw scallion: a clean, sharp, almost watery bite that cuts the richness. The tofu-skin wrapper is soft and cool and faintly beany, holding it all together in one mouthful. Done badly, the pork is overcooked and chewy because the velveting was skipped or the oil too hot, or the sauce is left raw and harshly salty and pasty because it was not cooked down and sweetened, sitting on the tongue like uncooked bean paste.

Two techniques carry the dish. The first is velveting (上浆 / 划油): coating the lean loin slivers in egg white and starch builds a thin protein-starch film, and slipping them through oil at only about 四成热 (low, barely shimmering) sets that film fast so the meat's own moisture is sealed in — the slivers cook through without the surface tightening and squeezing water out, which is what makes lean pork go dry and stringy. The second is cooking the sauce. 甜面酱 is salty, raw-tasting, and pasty straight from the jar; fried briefly in oil with a little sugar and wine over moderate heat, its sugars and the sugar added begin to caramelize and undergo Maillard browning against the sauce's own proteins and amino acids, which deepens the color to a glossy red-brown and rounds the harsh salt into fragrance. A splash of water or stock keeps it from scorching and lets it reduce to a clinging glaze; the velveted pork goes in only at the end and is tossed just to coat, so it never toughens.