Sweet and Sour Ribs 糖醋排骨

Sweet and Sour Ribs – one of the most famous and popular Chinese dishes.

Ms Shi~

Every piece of the sweet and sour ribs are coated with amber color sauce, which has a sticky texture and a perfectly balanced sweet and sour taste.

After 1 hour of slow cooking, the ribs are so flavorful and fall off the bone tender.

Sweet and Sour Sauce

Usually Chinese chefs wouldn’t use any measuring tools when they add seasonings. We would just roughly measure it with our “Chinese eyeballs”.

However, to make authentic Chinese Sweet and Sour Ribs, most (if not all) Chinese chefs would tell you to pay extra attention to the ratio of sugar and vinegar.

Some chefs are very creative to call sweet and sour ribs as “12345 ribs“, so that people can easily remember the ratios of 5 basic ingredients:

Cooking wine (1 tbsp), regular soy sauce (2 tbsps), Chinkiang vinegar (3 tbsps), sugar (4 tbsps), and water (5 tbsps). 

The “12345 formula” is helpful for you to remember the rule of thumb ratio.

Based on this ratio, you can gradually adjust the amount of each seasoning everything you make your sweet and sour ribs, until you find the best ratio of sauce for you!

To me, I’d prefer the ribs to be more on the sweet and sour side, instead of on the salty side. So I’d add more sugar and vinegar with less soy sauce.

How to caramelize the ribs with sugar

A traditional and brilliant Chinese method to caramelize the meat is called Chao Tang Shai (炒糖色, stir-fry to get a caramel color ).

Specifically, chefs will stir-fry rock sugar (cane sugar will also work) with oil or water until it’s fully melt and turns into an amber color. Then add in the ribs to stir-fry until every piece of the ribs is evenly coated with the sticky caramel sauce.

It looks kinda like spare rib tanghulu!😂

This meat browning step can be use to cook sweet and sour ribs, red braised pork, and roasted braised duck, to make the finished dish looks glossy and tastes sticky.

However, if you are worried about getting oil splashed or burning the sugar, you could also skip this Chao Tang Shai step, and simply add 1 tsp of dark soy sauce to bring the ribs a glossy and reddish color.

How to Blanch Pork Ribs?

The reason why Chinese people like to blanch the meat (焯水) is to get rid of the nasty smell from the impurities or leftover blood.

The key point of the blanching process is using cold water for meat, hot water for vegetables.

When we boil the meat in cold water, as the water temperature rises, the blood and impurities will slowly released from the meat. However, if we put the raw meat directly into a pot of boiling water, the surface of the meat will turn hard and tight immediately, which would actually seal the blood and impurities in the meat.

Nevertheless, when we blanch the vegetables, we will need to bring the water to a boil before adding in the vegetables. It’s because boiling vegetables for too long will destroy the majority of vegetables’ nutrients and make them taste soggy instead of crunchy.

Starting from boiling water, we can do 1 minute for leafy vegetables, such as baby spinach, baby bokchoy, and kale; 3-5 minutes for stem vegetables, such as broccoli, celtuce, and cauliflowers.

Choice of Ingredients for Sweet and Sour Ribs

• Sugar – Chinese rock sugar can make your finished ribs look even shinier. But it’s totally fine to substitute the rock sugar with regular cane sugar.
• Vinegar – The best and most authentic vinegar for this dish is Chinkiang vinegar (Chinkiang 镇江 is a town in the Eastern part of China. This place is famous for producing black rice vinegar.)
  • If you can’t find Chinkiang vinegar, try to look for black rice vinegar instead. White rice vinegar or balsamic vinegar can’t be used for this dish.
• Regular soy sauce – Make sure you use regular/light soy sauce instead of dark soy sauce. We use regular/light soy sauce for its salty and umami taste, while we use dark soy sauce mainly for its reddish color, which can also be realized with the Chao Tang Shai technique we’ve introduced above.
• Shaoxing Wine – Shaoxing (绍兴) is a city in Southern China famous for producing rice wine. Shaoxing wine is widely used in Chinese meat dishes for getting rid of the bad smell from raw meat and adding a unique wine aroma to the dish.
  • Majority of the alcohol in cooking wine will evaporate during the cooking process, therefore dishes made with less than 3 tbsps of cooking wine is totally safe for children to eat.
  • If you can’t find Shaoxing wine nearby, you can substitute it with beer, but do not use red wine or white wine for this dish.
• Ginger and green onions are must-haves for making sweet and sour ribs. Optionally, you can add a bay leaf or 2 garlic cloves if you’d like to add more flavors to this dish.

How to Make Sweet and Sour Ribs

Equipment

• Measuring spoons
• Wok/fry pan with lid
• Nonstick heat-resistant turner

INGREDIENTS  

• 900 g spare ribs – chopped into 1½-inch short pieces (about 2 lbs)
• 1 L cold water (for blanching the ribs)
• 1 tbsp cooking oil (I used vegetable oil)
• 5 tbsp cane sugar (Chinese rock sugar would actually do a better job in this recipe)
• 2 stalks green onion/scallion (about 20g)
• 5 slices of ginger (about 10g)
• 3 tbsp cooking wine
• 3 tbsp regular soy sauce (not dark soy sauce)
• 5 tbsp Chinkiang vinegar (also known as black rice vinegar)
• 400 ml hot water (for boiling the ribs)
• ½ tbsp roasted sesame seeds (optional)

INSTRUCTIONS 

– Prepare ingredients and sauce

1. Cut 10g ginger into 5 slices. Cut the green onions/scallions into halves, cut the white stem parts into 2-inch pieces, finely chop the green leaf parts. Set aside.

2. Add cooking wine, regular soy sauce, and Chinkiang vinegar into a small bowl. Set aside.

– Blanch the ribs

1. Put chopped spare ribs into a large pot, add enough cold water (I used about 1L water here) to make sure that every piece of the ribs are immersed in water.

2. Bring the water to a boil over high heat. Use a spoon to skim off the foam appearing on the surface.

3. Once there’s no more foam released from the ribs, drain the ribs.

– Cook the sweet and sour ribs

1. Preheat a wok/fry pan over medium high heat for 1 minute. Add 1 tbsp cooking oil to the wok. Add the blanched ribs to stir fry over medium high heat until the ribs turn golden brown.

2. Turn off the heat, transfer the ribs to a plate. Use a spoon to scope out some oil in the wok. Leave about 1 tbsp of oil in the wok.

3. Turn on the stove to medium heat, add 5 tbsps of sugar (or 50g Chinese rock sugar) to the wok, stir fry with a nonstick heat-resistant turner over medium heat for about 5 minutes until the sugar melts and turns into golden brown.

4. Quickly but carefully add the stir-fried ribs to the wok, stir fry over medium heat until every piece of the ribs is evenly coated with the caramelized sugar.

5. Pour the sauce we’ve prepared in previous step over the ribs. Add about hot water to immerse the ribs. (I added about 400ml hot water. The amount of hot water might vary depending on the shape and size of your wok.) Add in ginger slices and the white stem part of the green onions.

6. Cover the lid, bring to a boil over high heat, then turn the heat to low to simmer for 1 hour.

7. 1 hour later, open the lid, pick out and discard all the gingers and green onions. Reduce the sauce over high heat for about 7 minutes, keep stirring so that every piece of the ribs are evenly coated with the sauce.

8. Once there’s almost no sauce left in the bottom of the wok, remove from heat. Sprinkle chopped green onions and sesame seeds (optional) over the ribs. Transfer to a serving plate, serve with steamed white rice.

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