Jiangjin Crispy Pork Slices in Sauce 江津肉片
Jiangjin Crispy Pork Slices in Sauce is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
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Jiangjin Crispy Pork Slices in Sauce (江津肉片) is a dish from Jiangjin District (江津区), Chongqing, of starch-coated pork slices fried crisp and finished in a sour, sweet, salty and hot sauce. The Chongqing Morning Post (重庆晨报) traces it to the Jijiang riverside street (几江河街) in the late Qing dynasty.
How it is made
The dish took its standard form in 1959. Jiangjin chefs replaced the pork offcuts of the original with selected skinned pork leg meat (猪去皮腿尖肉) and added wood-ear fungus, sliced bamboo shoots and green vegetable hearts to brighten the plate. They also set a standard length, width and thickness for the slices so that every piece fries evenly, opens out flat and comes out golden and crisp outside, tender and juicy inside.
The cooking method changed as well. The older dish was fried and then had its sauce poured over (炸—淋, 'fry, then pour'); the standard version is fried and then tossed through the sauce in the wok (炸—熘, 'fry, then toss').
Flavour and texture
The flavour was fixed as sour, sweet, salty and hot, with the aroma of ginger, spring onion and garlic, a profile the chefs called 'little yuxiang' (小鱼香味), after the Sichuan 'fish-fragrant' seasoning. The Chongqing Morning Post sums up the finished plate as yellow, green, white and black in colour, with the pork crisp outside and tender within.
Where it comes from
The Jijiang riverside street was a Yangtze shipping stop lined with teahouses, inns and eateries. In the story the newspaper retells, the owner of a small restaurant there called Xinglong (兴隆), He Ming (何銘), had run out of ingredients when a group of travelling merchants arrived after lunch. He coated the day's leftover pork scraps in starch, fried them and poured over a sour-hot sauce, and the merchants named the result after Jiangjin. Other eateries on the street soon copied it.
In 1959 the Sichuan Provincial Department of Commerce held a province-wide catering exhibition in Chengdu, and Jiangjin's commerce authorities had local chefs Zhou Qingyun (周清云), Luo Canyun (罗灿云) and Du Binghui (杜炳辉) revise and standardise the dish before taking it there. After the exhibition it spread across eastern, western, northern and southern Sichuan.
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Hechuan Crispy Pork Slices 合川肉片 →
The Chongqing Morning Post describes Hechuan pork slices as very close in method, colour and taste; the 1959 Jiangjin chefs set their dish apart from Hechuan's pan-sear, fry and stir-fry method and its sour-sweet-salty-savoury litchi flavour (荔枝味).
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.