Chinese · Pork
Sweet and Sour Pork
About this recipe
Chinese cuisine is regional rather than singular — the spice of Sichuan, the soy-and-ginger of Cantonese, the wheat dumplings of the north. A few foundational techniques (wok hei, double-cooking, the brine-then-roast cycle for meats) cross every regional line.
As a pork dish, Sweet and Sour Pork works through the same fast-and-slow divide as other red meats — quick-seared chops vs slow-cooked shoulder — with the cut dictating the right cooking time and temperature.
Use the scaler above to set the number of servings you actually want to cook — quantities resize with culinary fractions, units promote sensibly (three teaspoons become a tablespoon), and the result reads like the recipe was written for your table.
Recipe data is sourced from TheMealDB's open community database; ScaleRecipe handles the curation, the scaling math, the editorial commentary, and the conversion utilities woven into each page.
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Method
- Preparation
- 1. Crack the egg into a bowl. Separate the egg white and yolk.
- Sweet and Sour Pork
- 2. Slice the pork tenderloin into strips.
- 3. Prepare the marinade using a pinch of salt, one teaspoon of starch, two teaspoons of light soy sauce, and an egg white.
- 4. Marinade the pork strips for about 20 minutes.
- 5. Put the remaining starch in a bowl. Add some water and vinegar to make a starchy sauce.
- Sweet and Sour Pork
- Cooking Instructions
- 1. Pour the cooking oil into a wok and heat to 190°C (375°F). Add the marinated pork strips and fry them until they turn brown. Remove the cooked pork from the wok and place on a plate.
- 2. Leave some oil in the wok. Put the tomato sauce and white sugar into the wok, and heat until the oil and sauce are fully combined.
- 3. Add some water to the wok and thoroughly heat the sweet and sour sauce before adding the pork strips to it.
- 4. Pour in the starchy sauce. Stir-fry all the ingredients until the pork and sauce are thoroughly mixed together.
- 5. Serve on a plate and add some coriander for decoration.
Cooking notes
When scaling protein-led dishes, weigh the meat rather than counting pieces, and remember that the pan size limits how much you can sear at once.
For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.
When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.
Scaling notes
Scaling Sweet and Sour Pork
Sweet and Sour Pork is written for around four servings as it stands on this page — scaling it up for a party or down for a meal-for-one is the small math problem most home cooks face every week. Here's how this particular dish responds to scaling, what changes linearly, and what doesn't.
Pork shares scaling rules with beef — braising time is collagen-driven and mass-independent, while quick-cook methods like searing scale by the piece. Sweet and Sour Pork benefits from weight-based ingredient measurement when scaled up: pork roasts in particular vary significantly in actual yield, and a recipe written for "2 lb shoulder" can mean anything from 800 g to 1.1 kg of cooked meat.
This recipe calls for eggs, which are the trickiest ingredient to scale to non-integer multiples. A US "large" egg weighs about 50 g; if a fractional scaling lands on, say, 1.5 eggs, beat one egg and weigh 25 g of the beaten mixture rather than guessing. The same goes for halving recipes — half an egg is 25 g of beaten egg, not a dramatic estimate.
Skip the math entirely — ScaleRecipe's scaler rewrites every ingredient line above with proper culinary fractions and smart unit promotion the moment you change the serving count. Open the scaler →
Beyond the recipe
Substitutions & make-ahead — Sweet and Sour Pork
Two things home cooks ask about most when they're outside the recipe's exact assumptions: what swaps work for which ingredients, and how the dish behaves when you make it ahead. Both depend on what Sweet and Sour Pork is doing structurally — here's the practical version.
Substitution ideas
Eggs
For binding (cookies, quick breads, meatballs): 1 large egg ≈ 1 tbsp ground flaxseed + 3 tbsp water, rested 5 minutes until gelled — structurally closest to a real egg. For moisture without structure (cakes, brownies): ¼ cup unsweetened applesauce or mashed banana per egg, accepting some loss of rise.
For weight-based swaps and arbitrary quantities, the ingredient density converter and the cup-to-grams chart cover most pantry staples.
Make-ahead and storage
Pork shoulder and slow-cooked pork dishes (Sweet and Sour Pork included if it falls in that family) improve overnight as the fat redistributes and flavours integrate. Cured pork — bacon, ham, sausage — keeps well refrigerated but loses its crisp edges in storage; re-crisp in a hot skillet or under the broiler. Quick-cooked pork chops are best served the day they're cooked; the meat tightens and dries through the refrigerate-and-reheat cycle.
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Sweet and Sour Pork
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Volume
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OpenWeight
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OpenTemperature
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OpenCooking time
The cube-root rule for scaling up, the differences between meat / cake / soup geometry, and sensible starting estimates.
OpenPan size
9-inch round vs 8-inch square vs 13×9. The math is surface area, not diameter — and the converter shows you both.
OpenLength
Inches and centimetres — for when a recipe says “cut into 1-inch pieces” and your ruler is metric.
OpenIngredient density
A cup of flour weighs 120 g; a cup of honey weighs 340. The full table of ~40 staples, with sources.
OpenOpen in main scaler
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OpenFrom the journal
Original essays on the small details.
The why behind the technique — original writing on the ingredient and equipment choices that separate a good cook from a frustrated one.
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Go deeper
Where this recipe sits in the wider tradition.
Each guide below is a real essay on the cuisine or the category — pillars, staples, techniques worth learning — paired with a curated grid of recipes filed under it.
Cuisine guide · Chinese
Cooking the Chinese way
Eight regional cuisines, one of the oldest cooking traditions on earth.
Open the guideCategory guide · Pork
How to cook in this category
The most universally cooked meat — every cuisine has its own pork tradition.
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