Chinese Food Recipes

The traditional Wuxi foods are very sweet and savoury types of food. In some alleys there are different kinds of foods on stick; it is very poular with a lot of locals going.

Wuxi Sweet and Salty pork SpareRibs: It is the most popular local dish in wuxi and is the specialty to look out for peple come to Wuxi. It features the common eastern technique of “Red Cooking” in a stock of rice wine and soy sauce and spiced with ginger, anise, cloves and black peppercorns and has unique red-sweet sauce on the top in order to give rich taste.

Story of Wuxi Sweet and Salty Pork SpareRibs recipe

Legend has it that the dish was first prepared by a peasant Lu Xiaosheng, who made it at the request of his sick wife. Supposedly, after partaking of Lu’s sparerib dish, the wife made a miraculous recovery from her illness.

Whether her miraculous recovery should be attributed to the deliciousness of said dish or attributed to the fact that Lu used a cooking implement that had been blessed by a god is unclear. The moral we should take from the story is that the spareribs were fantastic.

Recipe: Wuxi Sweet and Salty Pork SpareRibs

Ingredients for Wuxi Sweet and Salty Pork SpareRibs:

1 slab spareribs about 1 1/2 lbs

(A) Marinate:

1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine

(B) Seasoning:

1 tbsp oil
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tsp Shaoxing wine
1-2 tsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp tomato sauce
2 cups water
2 whole star anise
2cm cinnamon stick
5 slices of ginger
½ onion, sliced
2 stalks spring onion
6 cloves garlic
2 tbsp sugar
Salt & ground black pepper to taste

Steps to cook Wuxi Sweet and Salty Pork SpareRibs

1, Marinate the spareribs with ingredients (A) for 2 hours.

2, Heat oil in a pressure cooker. Fry ginger, spring onion and garlic until fragrant. Add spareribs and the remaining seasoning. Close the lid of the pressure cooker and bring pressure to high.

3, Reduce heat and pressurise for about 15 minutes. Turn of heat and release the pressure before opening lid. The meat should be tender. Cook meat uncovered until gravy is thick, almost dries up..

4, Sprinkle chopped spring onions on spareribs and serve

Enjoy this  easy and very delicious recipe.