Longxi Cured Pork Sandwich 陇西腊肉夹馍
Longxi Cured Pork Sandwich is featured among the local specialties of Gansu.
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Longxi Cured Pork Sandwich (陇西腊肉夹馍) is thinly sliced Longxi cured pork tucked into a steamed bun or flatbread straight from the pot, a way of eating the cured pork of Longxi County (陇西县) in Dingxi (定西), Gansu. The pork is eaten hot inside the bread.
Ingredients
The filling is pork with fat and lean in layers, coated with rock salt, Sichuan pepper, fennel and more than ten spices in all. It is cured for 45 days, then turned and dried in the open air for another 45 days. Xinhua notes that cured meat in the Longyou (陇右) region west of the Long Mountains (陇山) does not have to be smoked: Chen Yaozun (陈耀尊), author of a book on Longxi cured pork, explains that once cured and air-dried, the Longxi pork is ready to be steamed or boiled.
How it is eaten
Cooked, the pork turns glistening and translucent, with lean that is not dry and fat that is not greasy. It is cut into thin slices and tucked into a steamed bun (mantou, 馒头) or a flatbread just out of the pot, so the result is rich without greasiness and very soft. Fuzhou News, covering a Dingxi food festival held in Fuzhou in 2019, also recommends Longxi cured pork eaten hot inside bread. The same cured pork also goes into rolled pancakes, and with garlic chives into steamed buns that locals call 'seal buns' (一颗印包子) for their seal-like size.
Where it comes from
Curing in Longxi is recorded as dating back to around the Qianlong reign (乾隆, 1736 to 1795) of the Qing dynasty, and the making of Longxi cured pork is a Gansu provincial intangible cultural heritage item.
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.