A Simple, Every-Day Crowd-Pleaser

Of all the delightful, delicious and sometimes surprising things I ate when I lived in Kunming, the dish I ate most often in restaurants (after my favorite rice noodles) was a homey stir-fry called xiǎochǎo ròu (小炒肉) or “small-cooked meat” (which can also be translated as “quick-cooked pork”). The dish couldn’t be simpler: While every cook has their own twist on the idea, the base is always a combination of thinly sliced pork and lots of aromatic greens, usually scallions, garlic scapes and/or garlic chives. Like most dishes in central Yunnan, it is flavored and spiced up with some dried chiles and, often, red Sichuan pepper, but it is never particularly spicy. The flavor is, instead, rustic and comforting, and it became our go-to order when we were too tired or busy to dig through a restaurant’s dense menu of specialties—every chef made a version, and every version was delicious. 

When I moved back to the states, I added xiaochao rou to my regular dinner rotation at home; the combination of meat and vegetable in the same dish made it an easy weeknight option. But after making it regularly for over a decade, I realized that I didn’t actually know much about the dish’s history or cultural influences.

To rectify this, I reached out to Zhang Mei, the founder of the Wild China travel company (who grew up in Dali, in Central Yunnan) to learn a little more. She noted that the name xiaochao refers to the quick-cooking stir frying that defines this dish. “Xiaochao rou is my go-to dish almost on a daily basis,” she told me, noting that she’s been pursuing a PhD, in addition to running her business, and often has very little time to cook but that “xiaochao rou never fails and comes to my rescue all the time. The whole xiaochao process is no more than 3 minutes, in my case, and is always a crowd-pleaser.”

Zhang Mei also noted that there were a few vegetable combinations that were particularly popular in Yunnan: scallion and fresh green or red chili peppers (often spicy varieties); dried chilies with garlic scapes, garlic chives, or flowering chives; and scallion on its own—all paired with thinly sliced pork flavored with soy sauce (and sometimes a bit of Shaoxing wine). The most important things, she told me, were to use lots of vegetables—“the greens should almost match the meat in volume”—and to keep the dish fast and simple.

Curious to see if there were other common combinations, perhaps from other parts of Yunnan, I did a quick search online and was surprised to find that the dish that showed up on most sites (both in English and Chinese) was a version from Hunan made with pork belly, spicy fresh chilies and fermented black beans. For clarification on this version—and why it seems to be what cooks think of when they think of xiaochao rou—I reached out to cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop, who wrote an entire book about Hunan’s foods called Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (named for the fact that Hunan was Mao’s home province). 

“I think the main point with a xiaochao dish is that it’s an easy, everyday, quick stir-fry,” Fuchsia told me, confirming the impression I’d had in Yunnan. “In a restaurant, a stir-fried dish can be quite complex, with certain ingredients separately blanched or pre-fried before they all come together in the wok. But with a xiaochao, you normally just add the ingredients and seasonings to the wok in succession, one after the other, without any extra stages.” She noted that some of the world’s most famous Chinese dishes—like gong bao chicken—are made with the xiaochao method, and that if a particular dish, like the one in Hunan, was specifically known as “xiaochao rou,” it was probably because it was an especially popular version and people had started to treat it as archetypal of the method.

In my house, the archetypal version of the dish is one made with a mix of scallions and garlic chives, plus a few dried chilies and a generous scoop of red Sichuan pepper. This is the way the quick-cooked pork was prepared in one of my favorite restaurants in Kunming—a homey spot called Tusheng Shiguan (土生食馆, Native Foods Restaurant) that was the city’s first community supported farm-to-table eatery—and I liked it so much that the owner, a young mother named Yang Lifeng, showed me how to make it. It’s easy and delicious, and the flavor always takes me right back to Yunnan.

Cutting and Flavoring Quick-Cooked Pork

Xiaochao rou is a very beginner-friendly dish. While this recipe calls for thin slices of meat, the method is flexible and rustic enough that you don’t need to worry about getting the very thinnest possible pieces. (No need to partially freeze the pork or use any other tricks you might employ for dishes that require paper-thin slicing.) If your knife is sharp, simply pulling the meat gently away from the cleaver as you slice, to create some tension, should be sufficient for getting ¼-inch thick slices (more or less). And since quick-cooked pork doesn’t come apart during stir-frying as readily as beef or chicken, you don’t really have to worry about cutting against the grain or on the bias; just slice it in whatever direction is going to be easiest for your particular cut of meat.

You should, however, trim off any fat and connective tissue on the meat before you begin slicing. When I buy boneless pork loin for this dish at my market’s butcher counter, I generally ask for just under 1 pound—by the time I’ve trimmed the meat, I’ll have 12–14 ounces of meat left.  (I set the trimmings aside and use them to flavor stir-fried vegetables.)

Because you’re not adding a flavorful sauce to this dish, you’ll want to make sure that the meat itself is as flavorful as possible by marinating it in some soy sauce. I like to use a spoonful of light soy sauce, for flavor, plus a few drops of dark soy sauce, for color. Some cooks, like Zhang Mei, also add a touch of Shaoxing wine to their quick-cooked pork, but I find that it’s not necessary for this particular combination of ingredients—the alliums, some dried xiao mi la chilies and the big scoop of Sichuan peppercorns already add some strong flavor to the finished dish. You can marinate the meat as long as you like (maybe up to 20 minutes total), but I usually keep things as fast as possible, since that’s the whole point of this dish, and just let it sit while I cut up the rest of the ingredients. 

You can also give the meat a silkier texture by adding some starch to the marinade. (I’ve used cornstarch here, but potato or another similar starch will work just as well.) Not every cook does this—I didn’t include this in the version of the recipe published in my book, because I was recreating that particular cook’s process as faithfully as possible—but I’ve added it here because I enjoy the texture it adds, and it doesn’t make the prep process any longer. 

Make Xiaochao Rou Your Own

As both Fuchsia and Zhang Mei noted, this dish is extremely flexible. I’m partial to the combination of scallion and garlic chives I’ve included below because it brings back memories of eating at Tusheng Shiguan, but you can really add any vegetables that you have around that work well with pork. In the spring you could try using thick, fragrant garlic scapes (蒜苔, suàntái). In late summer you could use the classic Yunnan combination of pork and hot chilies. In winter, you could use a leafy green like choi sum (菜心, càixīn), which would give you a dish reminiscent of certain Cantonese preparations. In fact, even the choice of meat is flexible: while cooks in Yunnan use lean pork, Fuschia’s Hunnan cookbook includes a recipe for xiaochao lamb, and Zhang Mei told me that in California, where she now lives, she often makes the dish with chicken breasts. 

If you decide to make this dish with a denser, slower-cooking vegetable like thick slices of peppers, you should use Zhang Mei’s preferred cooking method: take the meat out of the wok before cooking the vegetables and add then add it back in at the end. This way you can stir-fry the vegetables for as long as needed without worrying about the meat. This approach is also helpful if you swap the pork for chicken, since chicken breast meat dries out more quickly.

For more easy pork recipes, see Xueci’s Stir-Fried Pork Slivers With Pickled Mustard (Zhacai Rousi, 榨菜肉丝) and Taylor’s All-Purpose Pork and Pickled Green Bean Stir-fry (Roumo Jiangdou) and Chengdu Huiguorou (Twice-Cooked Pork, 回锅肉).