Yuxiang Pork (Yuxiang Rousi, 鱼香肉丝)

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Yu Xiang Pork by The Mala Market

Chengdu Challenge #25: This Is Not Pork in Garlic Sauce

Yuxiang pork is often translated in the U.S. as pork in garlic sauce. But yuxiang is so much more than a garlic sauce. It’s sweet-and-sour-and-chili-and-garlic sauce. To me, it is what sweet-and-sour sauce should be, but more intriguing and deep. It’s got the tang of dark vinegar just barely tamed by sugar, plus the trinity of garlic-ginger-scallions. But garlic does not dominate, it is just perfectly balanced with the slightly sweet-and-sour and the spicy chili element.

The literal translation of yuxiang rousi, fish-fragrant pork slivers, is just as misleading. The yuxiang flavor has no fish ingredients, nor any fish smell or taste. However the sauce originated as one for fish, so the name stuck for anything that later got favored with the same super flavorful sauce, such as this pork or the pinnacle of yuxiang—yuxiang eggplant.

The chili component of the sauce for yuxiang pork is often paolajiao—long, red, pickled erjingtiao chilies—but they are usually next to impossible  to find in the U.S. We sometimes are able to source paojiao at The Mala Market, but I have also found that you can make a very similar tasting chili by doing a short natural ferment of the dried erjingtiaochilies we carry. This is an ideal ingredient for people who eat gluten-free, as the pickled chilies contain no wheat, whereas most Sichuan sauces do.

The alternative is doubanjiang, and, specifically, hongyou douban, or red oil douban, the type of broad bean paste fermented with chili and mixed with oil, which has a bright-red color and taste that works exceptionally well in this dish.

Ideally, the co-star with the lean pork is celtuce, also called asparagus lettuce, which is crisp and light and extremely delicious but available only in Chinese markets. Celery has a distinctly different taste, but is a fine substitute. The other necessary supporting ingredient is dried wood ear mushrooms, also found only at Asian markets—and, as of 2022, at The Mala Market, in the delicate, premium cloud ear version.

a bag of the mala market wood ear cloud ear fungus showing the dried fungus on a wooden cutting board.
Premium cloud ear is small and thin and easier to hydrate than the coarser wood ear. Photo by Kathy Yuan
rinsing the soaked cloud ear under running water
Once soaked in warm water, they do resemble ears. Photo by Kathy Yuan

Below are two versions of yuxiang pork, made years apart with different ingredients. The first is made with celery and red-oil bean paste and the second is made with celtuce and pickled erjingtiao chilies.

Ingredients for YuXiang Pork (Pork in Garlic Sauce)
Version 1: Celery and red-oil broad bean paste accompany the pork slivers. (I actually mixed red-oil douban and pickled chilies here, which is purely optional)
Yuxiang Pork stir-fried in wok
Red-oil douban makes for a saucy sauce of chili bean goodness
Celtuce, woodear and pickled peppers
Version 2: I was able to get my hands on some celtuce and used pickled Sichuan chilies I made from dried erjingtiao chilies
Yuxiang Pork on white plate
This one is less saucy, but tastes more purely of chili and not beans. This is the best choice for people eating gluten-free

One final note that applies to almost all of my stir-fry recipes. Everyone’s ingredients, wok, stove, humidity, altitude, etc., are different, so your version will never be just like mine. So if you are nearing the end of a dish and the sauce is too thick, just splash in a little chicken stock or water; if it is too thin, add a bit more of a cornstarch slurry. I always have both ready to go if I need them.  But you really can’t go too wrong with yuxiang; it’s good no matter what and it goes with everything. You could use it with chicken or fish or tofu. Some Sichuan cooks even put it on English peas.

For more yuxiang dishes, see my classic Sichuan Yuxiang Eggplant (Yuxiang Qiezi, 鱼香茄子) and Yuxiang Zucchini (Yuxiang Xianangua, 鱼香夏南瓜)!

Yuxiang Pork (Yuxiang Rousi, 鱼香肉丝)

By: Taylor Holliday | The Mala Market | Inspiration & Ingredients for Sichuan Cooking
Adapted from Sichuan (China) Cuisine in Both Chinese and English, published in China in 2010 by the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine and the Sichuan Gourmet Association.

Ingredients 

  • ¾ to 1 pound lean pork, cut in very thin strips or slivers about 2 inches long
  • 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine
  • 3 stalks Western celery or 6 stalks Chinese celery or equivalent amount of celtuce, cut in thin strips (save leaves for garnish)
  • A small handful of dried wood ear or cloud ear fungus, to make about ½ cup when rehydrated
  • 1 tablespoon minced ginger
  • 2 tablespoons minced garlic
  • 3 tablespoons minced scallion
  • 1 tablespoon Pixian chili bean paste (preferably red-oil bean paste, hongyou douban) OR 2-3 tablespoons minced pickled erjingtiao chilies
  • 3 tablespoons Baoning or Zhenjiang vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 1 tablespoon Chinese light soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine
  • 3 tablespoons chicken stock or water
  • 1 tablespoon cornstarch mixed with equal amount of water
  • ¼ cup canola or peanut oil

Instructions 

  • Prep ingredients: slice pork into thin strips, which is much easier to do if it is slightly frozen. Marinate pork strips in Shaoxing wine. Cover wood ear mushrooms in very hot water and let sit for about 15 minutes or until soft, drain and slice thinly. Slice celery (or celtuce) in thin strips to match pork strips. Mince ginger, garlic and scallions.
  • In a small bowl or measuring cup mix vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine and chicken stock. Mix cornstarch and water in another small prep bowl.
  • Heat wok over high flame until heat starts to rise. Add ¼ cup oil and when hot add the pork strips. Spread them out and let them cook, stirring and flipping them every so often until just cooked through. Move the pork to the sides of the wok with your spatula and add the ginger, garlic and scallions to the well in the center. There should be plenty of oil to briefly cook them. Add chili bean paste (or pickled chilies) and cook briefly. Mix in the pork, then add celery and wood ear strips. Mix all together and stir-fry until celery starts to wilt.
  • Add vinegar sauce mixture and distribute well, then add cornstarch slurry a bit at a time, continuing to stir-fry, until sauce thickens (you might not need it all). Plate and garnish with celery leaves.

Tried this recipe?

 

About Taylor Holliday

The Mala Market all began when Taylor, a former journalist, created this blog as a place to document her adventures learning to cook Sichuan food for Fongchong, her recently adopted 11-year-old daughter. They discovered through the years that the secret to making food that tastes like it would in China is using the same ingredients that are used in China. The mother-daughter team eventually began visiting Sichuan’s factories and farms together and, in 2016, opened The Mala Market, America’s source for heritage Sichuan ingredients and Chinese pantry essentials.

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31 Comments

  1. I’ve been working my way through your recipes and really love them! In Chicago finding ingredients is not hard including all the Lao gan ma product:)

    For yu Xiang what would you suggest I sub for celery? I really dislike the taste of it.

    1. Thanks, Mike! Happy to hear that.

      The original recipe actually calls for celtuce, which I’m sure you can find around there. You would probably like that better. Just peel it and cut in thin sliver/slices.

  2. Hello, Taylor. I’m happy to find your blog — I was searching for an alternative to my tried and true yuxiang jou rou, for a change. This prompts me to ask, have you ever run across The Good Food of Szechuan, by Robert Delfs? I think he was a US graduate student in China in the 70s, unlikely as that sounds, and I’ve been using his book since 1982 — to the extent that my first copy simply fell apart (having already been partly melted by the sheer accumulation of sauce-splash…) and a few years ago I had to scramble to find a used one online. Anyway, he is my touchstone for this genre of cooking, and I wondered if you knew of the book, and whether you have an opinion of it.

    In any case, I’m very much looking forward to trying your version this evening — here in Columbus, OH, we have an excellent ‘omnicultural’ supermarket name Saraga which, by chance, is very near my house. It will certainly have the sauces I need. My own YX pork has relied on chopped fresh red chilies, but clearly your seasonings take the dish in a different and I suspect more interesting direction. Thanks in advance!

    1. Hi Julian,
      When I started this blog in 2014, I was cooking from three beloved Sichuan cookbooks and that was one of them! (See About page for the other two.) It is an amazing work for its time, though now we have access to more Sichuan-made products than he assumed. I hope you found what you needed and the dish turned out good. (And thank you so much for your order from The Mala Market too!)

  3. this is one of my top all-time dishes. truly. i’ll be adding lots of garlic to mine. also am happy to learn that celery will sub for the celtuce — i love celery!

  4. Any suggestions for reducing the heat in this dish? We made this the other night and used Laoganma’s Pickled Chili and Huy Fong’s Sambal Oelek chili paste. The end result was really, really hot and spicy. We do enjoy spicy foods, but this was over the top spicy. We were looking for the dish to be more balanced. Any suggestions ? Thanks.

    1. Yes, I can imagine that using LGM pickled chili, or any Hunan-style salted chili, would make this dish way too hot! The Sichuan pickled chilies used for it, er jing tiao, are just moderately hot and are not meant to overpower the sweet and sour flavors. I would suggest using the sambal oelek on its own, or for a truly authentic taste, pickling our dried er jing tiao chilies in a salt brine for a few days (as per this recipe). That’s probably your best bet, since Sichuan’s naturally fermented chilies are very difficult to import and you likely will not find them in the U.S.

  5. I made a version of this last night using ground beef, celery, and red and green bell peppers. It turned out very tasty even though you might not find what I made in Sichuan. Thank you Mala Market!