Sweet Red Bean Pork

The documentary record for Sweet Red Bean Pork begins in the late Qing dynasty. Food historian Lan Yong, in A History of Sichuan Cuisine, cross-referenced banquet menus recorded by writer Li Jieren covering the Daoguang and Xianfeng reigns (early-to-mid 19th century) and found no trace of the dish. It appears for the first time in the Chengdu General Survey (《成都通览》), compiled during the Guangxu reign (late 19th century), listed as the lead dish of Chengdu's southern-restaurant repertoire. This places the dish's crystallization firmly in Chengdu's urban dining culture of the mid-to-late Qing, after which it spread into the rural banquet tradition of the nine-bowl spread. Popular legends tying the dish to Liu Feng, adoptive son of Liu Bei of the Three Kingdoms period, are later folk embellishments with no historical documentation. In 2020, it was recognized among 35 Classic Traditional Sichuan Dishes (1860–1980) at the inaugural Chengdu International Sichuan Cuisine Chefs Festival.

Lift a pair of slices and you get two folded leaves of pork belly with a dark seam of red bean paste between them. The fat has gone translucent and trembling from the long steam, quietly glistening. The rind — blistered into tiger-skin during the earlier frying, then steamed back into soft, bouncy collagen — carries a faint sweetness of fermented rice. The bean paste is smooth and dense, its sweetness quiet and grounded rather than sharp. This is a deep, mellow sweet — not the cloying kind, but the kind that comes from bean and lard slow-cooked together. One or two slices, eaten in unhurried bites, is quite enough.

Three steps define the dish: tiger-skin frying (走红), butterfly-slicing (连刀片), and a long steam. The 走红 step creates the signature textural contrast: the boiled belly is rubbed while still hot with fermented rice paste and honey, dried, then lowered skin-down into 70%-heat oil until the skin blisters and darkens — those bubbles collapse into soft, bouncy gelatin during steaming. The butterfly cut requires precise knife control: the first cut goes three-quarters of the way through, the second cuts fully across, leaving two slices joined at the rind so they fold open, receive the filling, and close shut. The bean paste (洗沙) must be made separately: red beans are boiled, sieved to remove the skins, then slow-fried with rapeseed oil and brown sugar until the paste holds a mound without slumping. Steaming must run 90 minutes or longer — only sustained gentle heat fully hydrolyzes the collagen in the fat cap, converting it from waxy to silken; under-steamed fat stays rubbery, over-steamed pork loses its shape and weeps oil.