Sweet and Sour Spare Ribs

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Or Tang Cu Pai Gu as I call them.  Everything up until now has been relatively simple or straight forward so I was particularly happy with the way this turned out.  It’s slightly more complicated so I’ll break it down into different parts.

Spare Ribs

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs spare ribs
• 5 tbsp starch
• 1 tbsp flour

Directions:

1. Place the spare ribs in a large pot with water and bring to a boil.
2. Strain the spare ribs and dump the water.  This is mainly to get rid of all the blood.
3. Put the spare ribs back into the pot and add enough water to cover the spare ribs.  Add 1.5 tbsp salt.
4. Cook for 30 minutes.
5. While that’s cooking,prepare a mixture of the starch,the flour,and about 1/3 cup of water.
6. When the spare ribs have finished cooking,strain them and set them aside.  You can keep the stock left over from this.  My mom usually stores it and uses it for a light soup.
7. In a wok (or a frying pan works),heat some oil.  If you’re using a wok,put in enough oil so that the spare ribs can be completely submerged.
8. Dredge the spare ribs and quickly fry them for 3-4 minutes.  If you’re using a frying pan or do not have enough oil to completely submerge,fry for two minutes on each side.

Sweet and Sour sauce:

Ingredients:

• 4 tbsp sugar
• 4 tbsp vinegar
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 heaping tbsps of corn starch
• 6 tbsp of water

No real directions,just mix it all up.  Make sure there are no clumps of corn starch in the mixture.

Putting it all together

What’s nice about this recipe is that you can make the spare ribs in advance but wait until later to do this final step.

Ingredients:

• 0.5 tbsp minced ginger
• 1 clove minced garlic
• 2 chopped scallion stalks (diagonal cut)
• spare ribs
• sweet and sour sauce

Directions:

1. Heat up 2 tbsp of oil in a pan or wok.  The leftover oil from before works fine,just pour out the excess oil.  I usually put it in a small container and save it for later.
2. When the oil is hot,add the ginger and the garlic.
3. As soon as they get fragrant,add the spare ribs and cook for 1-2 minutes.  This is just to warm up the spare ribs if they have been sitting for a while.
4. Add the sweet and sour sauce.  Add a little more water if the sauce starts to congeal too much.
5. Add the scallion stalks when the spareribs are evenly coated.
6. Cook for another 1-2 minutes.

That’s “it”!  This is easily my favorite dish.  You can adjust the proportions of the sauce to fit your tastes.  More sugar if you like things sweeter,more vinegar if you like things more sour.  You can also add more starch if you’d like a more sticker sauce in the final dish.  Enjoy!