Danshui Crispy Pork Meatballs 淡水酥丸
Danshui Crispy Pork Meatballs is featured among the local specialties of Guangdong.
Danshui Crispy Pork Meatballs (淡水酥丸) are balls of pork beaten to a paste with iron bars and fried in peanut oil until golden, from the Danshui (淡水) area of Huizhou (惠州), Guangdong. The culture bureau of Huiyang District (惠阳区) records them as golden crispy meatballs (黄金酥丸), a traditional Hakka (客家) dish of the East River (东江) region. Older residents of the Danshui area and Huicheng District (惠城区) credit the recipe to He Daji (何达记).
How it is made
The pork must come from a village pig slaughtered before dawn the same day. Lean and fat meat are used at a ratio of about 10 to 3; the best lean meat runs from the hind leg to the rump, though loin from the back also works. The lean is trimmed of sinew and membrane and cut into strips, and it is never rinsed, only scraped clean with a knife. No water is added during beating either, since wet meat will not bind into a paste.
Two solid iron bars, about 30 centimetres long and around 3 kilograms the pair, beat the strips for more than an hour, hard at first and then more lightly, until the meat is a sticky paste. In a copper basin the paste is mixed with 5 per cent light brine and 30 per cent fat pork diced to the size of soybeans. No flour, seasoning or raising agent goes in.
The cook squeezes the paste out through a closed fist and scoops each ball off with a spoon; balls are usually about 2 centimetres across. They go straight into pure peanut oil to soak so that they do not stick together, a step the Huiyang bureau says sets them apart from other Hakka meatballs. Balls and oil are then tipped together into a wok heated to 120 °C and turned constantly with a strainer. When the balls swell, float and turn golden they are done. The frying oil is used only once.
Flavour and texture
Made this way the balls are juicy and tender with a firm, springy bite. With nothing added but brine and diced fat, the taste is of fresh pork.
Where it comes from
The Huiyang bureau dates the technique to the Qianlong reign (乾隆) of the Qing dynasty, more than 200 years ago. It points to Yuan Mei's (袁枚) cookbook Suiyuan Shidan (随园食单, 1792), which describes teacup-sized meatballs of half fat and half lean pork, chopped very fine, made by an official in eastern Guangdong. The balls were first a dish of official households and are eaten at festivals and celebration banquets. In 2015 the golden crispy meatball technique entered Guangdong's sixth provincial list of intangible cultural heritage.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-23. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.