Sweet and Sour Pork with Pineapple 菠萝咕噜肉
Sweet and Sour Pork with Pineapple is featured among the local specialties of Guangdong.
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Sweet and Sour Pork with Pineapple (菠萝咕噜肉) is the Cantonese dish of starch-coated, deep-fried pork tossed in a thick sweet-and-sour sauce with peppers, onion and pineapple. It is served across Guangzhou (广州), Hong Kong and Macau, and is one of the Chinese dishes best known to Europeans and Americans, who know it as sweet and sour pork. Chinese Wikipedia lists gulao rou (古老肉) as another name and gives its original name as gulu rou (古卤肉), after a sauce that could be reused.
How it is made
Cooks usually use pork shoulder (脢头), half fat and half lean. The meat is cut into pieces, marinated, coated in starch and deep-fried until golden; Cantonese kitchens often fry it twice, first at about 160°C to cook it through and then at about 190°C to crisp the outside. The sauce, called gulu sauce (咕噜汁), is cooked from tomato ketchup, hawthorn, sugar and lemon juice, and pineapple juice may also go in. Green and red peppers, onion and pineapple chunks are stir-fried briefly, then the fried pork goes back in and is tossed quickly so it is coated without going soft.
Flavour and texture
A good plate has a thick sauce that clings to every piece, with no thin sauce left pooling on the plate; when a piece is lifted with chopsticks, the sauce should draw out into threads. The coating stays crisp, and the fat and lean pork inside should give way under light pressure from the tongue. The meat tastes of pork under the sweetness, balanced between salty and sweet.
Where it comes from
The dish comes from 18th-century Cantonese cooking. It became popular because it suited the foreigners living in Guangdong during the Qing dynasty, and Cantonese emigrants to the United States later spread it through the Cantonese restaurants they opened there. In 1995, at a world cooking contest in the United States, a Chinese team led by Wu Zigui (吴自贵) of Guangzhou Restaurant (广州酒家) drew a mystery basket that held pineapple and pork, among other things, and chose sweet-and-sour gulu pork as its starter. The same method is used for spare ribs, chicken, prawns, grouper and a vegetarian tofu version.
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.