A One-Night Homestyle Special

Consider this classic Sichuan dish the next time you want to impress a table: 蒜泥白肉 (suànní báiròu), thinly sliced pork (“white meat”) smothered in a red-oil garlic-paste concoction. The hardest part of suanni bairou is slicing the meat, and even then, the tantalizing red oil dressing hides any number of shoddy knife-work sins. Balanced by the fresh crunch of raw cucumber—or my favorite, spring celtuce, pictured above—your guests will be too busy sopping up every last drop of sauce to notice how simple suanni bairou really is. If they do notice, they certainly won’t mind.

Take note when we publish these “homestyle” dishes. Banquet flavors and secretive fly restaurant recipes have the benefits of mass production and an entire kitchen staff on their side to perfect local, time-honored tastes. But the beauty of 家常菜 (jiācháng cài), homestyle food, belongs to a homemaker’s instinctive practicality. Without professional kitchen instruments and long prep times, home cooks make the same old flavors and nostalgic spirit accessible for a single dish on one night only. And with each home-cooked dish come the unique preferences and tastes of the family preparing it.

Selecting Ingredients for Suanni Bairou

The three main flavors of traditional suanni bairou are pounded garlic paste (蒜泥, suànní), red oil (红油, hóngyóu) and “concocted” soy sauce (复制酱油, fùzhì jiàngyóu), a sweetened, aromatic, slow-simmered Sichuan soy concoction.

• Fuzhi jiangyou is made by simmering a 3:1 ratio of the spiced soy sauce to Chinese black/brown sugar (红糖, hóngtáng), until the moisture content dries up and the sauce coats the back of a spoon. However, it’s inconvenient to make in the small quantities always called for, and infrequently featured to begin with. If you have a preexisting batch at home, by all means, put it to work. For those who don’t, I find The Mala Market’s Zhongba Dark Soy Sauce a really great alternative in this easy, homestyle dish. Its concentrated flavor of sweet, savory umami stands up well against the sharp raw garlic and spicy red oil.
• As for the hongyou, I used my ultra-mouthwatering 香辣 (xiānglà)/fragrant-hot Aromatic Sichuan Chili Oil, a dressed-up version of our family’s Traditional Sichuan Chili Oil. The most important part of Sichuan hongyou is the 菜籽油 (càizǐyóu) roasted rapeseed oil base. The instantly recognizable fragrance has no substitutes, and the viscosity of the oil even helps make red-oil cold dressings cling better.
• Pounding garlic into paste takes some persistence. More than time, you really need to exert some energy to pound that garlic into a pulp. Otherwise, you’ll experience what my friends did when I tasked them with pounding garlic for a recent hotpot night: 20 minutes of uninspired tapping while complaining that making paste was impossible, until I took over and processed it in within the minute. Anyway, raw garlic is very sharp and spicy on the nose, and this dish’s garlic content is about 10 percent of the meat weight. The name is suanni bairou, garlic-paste white meat, for a reason! My dad isn’t the biggest fan of garlic, but even he loves this dish. The oils and dark soy sauce help round out the garlic flavor.
• In China, the favored meat for this dish is 二刀肉 (èrdāoròu), a pork cut below the tail located within the “ham” section. It’s mostly lean, with some fat, and carries the skin. At home, use whatever leaner, boneless, rectangular prism of a cut you prefer—lean pork belly, about 70 percent meat and 30 percent fat, is the easiest alternative. Since you’ll be slicing the pieces as uniformly as possible for show, you won’t be able to achieve a consistent look without a neat slab. For a 3-4 person serving (assuming there are other dishes eaten alongside), I used just half a strip of pork belly (approx. 1/2 pound).
• Serve suanni bairou atop slivered cucumber—or, my personal favorite, celtuce (when available). When local celtuce (莴笋, wōsǔn) is in season, I use it as much as possible. To select fresh celtuce, choose firm, sturdy stems and dark-green leafy tops. Avoid older celtuce with limp leaves if possible. You can stir-fry the leaves to eat on their own, so don’t toss them after trimming.

In a medium pot, add the pork, ginger, smashed scallion, huajiao, a generous pour of cooking wine and enough cold water to cover. Bring to a boil and simmer over low-medium heat for 15 minutes. Skim away the scum that rises to the surface. Test for doneness by poking the center of the meat through the skin with a chopstick—it should slide through easily with little resistance, and the juices should run clear. Turn off the heat and cover the pot so the meat can soak and finish cooking through residual heat, another 10-15 minutes. (For pork belly, the longer you cook it the more it breaks down. But you don’t want it super tender for suanni bairou, because then you won’t be able to cut it.)

Transfer the soaked pork to a cutting board and let it cool while you prepare the dressing. If preparing ahead of time, let the meat cool in the fridge. The rested and cooled meat will be easier to slice.

Roughly chop the smashed garlic and pound into paste with a small pinch of salt using a mortar and pestle. The soy sauce you’ll add later is salty too, so salt with a very light hand at this step. You can add a tiny bit of sesame oil to keep the garlic color from oxidizing if you prepare this step ahead of time.

In a small bowl or glass, add the garlic paste, dark soy sauce, light soy sauce, chili oil, toasted sesame oil and a big pinch of sugar. You can add ground huajiao or tengjiaoyou (Sichuan pepper oil) if you wish. Mix well to combine. You will have leftover dressing—I use the additional sauce to dress congee, noodles, rice, steamed buns, fried chicken, veggies, anything really. I’m not a botulism expert, but so far I haven’t noticed any change in smell or taste from using the leftover dressing weeks later. The salt and oils do help prevent the garlic from going bad.

Thinly slice the cooled pork (skin-side down). Unless you’re a knife master with years of practice, you probably won’t be able to get translucent, 1mm slices, so just aim for as thin and uniform as possible. My own slices are more like 1.5mm thick. The thinner your slices, the more slices you’ll get out of the strip, and the more dramatic your final plating will be. Also, since this is not a very tender steamed pork belly dish, thicker slices may be less enjoyable in texture.

Tip: wet your knife in hot water before slicing.

In fancy restaurants, the kitchen would re-dip the thinly sliced pork belly in hot water until the meat curls up before plating. This 15-20 second dip gives it a slight edge on flavor and technically makes it a 热拌菜 (rèbàn cài), “hot-tossed” dish, rather than the usual 凉拌菜 (liángbàn cài), “cold-tossed” dish.

In the center of a large serving plate, assemble the slivered celtuce in a tall circular mound. Arrange the pork belly slices around the mound, layering them neatly in the order they were sliced for the most uniform look. Gently spoon some of the garlic and chili flake bits from the dressing bowl over the slices to distribute the solid bits evenly. Pour or continue spooning the rest of the liquid dressing over the rest of the pork belly, allowing the red oil to pool generously at the foot of the mound.

For more liangban meat dishes that are perfect for warm-weather hosting when you don’t want to run the stove or oven for long, check out these other red-oil Chengdu favorites like Mala Mama’s 二姐兔丁(èrjiě tùdīng), Second Sister Rabbit Cubes, and Taylor’s 口水鸡 (kǒushuǐ jī), ‘Saliva’ (Mouthwatering) Chicken!