Yuexi Cured Meats 岳西腊味
Yuexi Cured Meats is featured among the local specialties of Anhui.
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Yuexi Cured Meats (岳西腊味) are the salted, sun-dried and smoked pork of Yuexi County (岳西县) in Anhui, which lies in the heart of the Dabie Mountains (大别山). Several ways of curing the meat are recorded in the county, from pork packed into jars with salted greens to pork smoked above the kitchen stove.
How it is made
The best-described form is jar-stored cured pork (翁腊肉). Anhui News (中安在线) describes pork from free-range farm black pigs being salted after the start of winter (立冬), dried in the sun and then hung in a ventilated room. Chinese cabbage is salted at the same time; after the start of spring (立春) it is dried in the sun and chopped, and packed into vats and jars with the pork, one layer of meat to one layer of salted greens, so that the two ferment together.
In Houshan village (后山村) of Wenquan town (温泉镇), People's Daily Online reports that villagers smoke their cured pork hanging over the kitchen stove and serve it to visitors.
Flavour and texture
Anhui News describes the jar-stored pork as mellow and fragrant, with fat that is not greasy and lean that does not catch in the teeth. The stove-smoked pork of Houshan is described as streaked with fat and lean and salty-savoury.
How it is eaten
Cured pork also goes into other Yuexi dishes. Maoxiang cakes (毛香粑) are dark green cakes of rice or wheat flour made with cured pork and the tender stems and leaves of a cudweed that sprouts in the second and third lunar months and is known locally as maoxiang; they taste salty and are soft and sticky. When Yuexi County held a vote for ten signature dishes for its Dabie Mountain azalea tourism and culture month, the dishes listed by the China Cuisine Association (中国烹饪协会) included poria-smoked cured pork (茯苓熏腊肉).
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.