Pickled Cabbage with Pork Belly 酸菜白肉
Pickled Cabbage with Pork Belly is featured among the local specialties of Jilin.
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Pickled Cabbage with Pork Belly (酸菜白肉) is a Northeastern Chinese dish of thin-sliced pork belly simmered with shredded sauerkraut and starch noodles, also called suancai cuan bairou (酸菜汆白肉). The Association for Tourism Exchange Across the Taiwan Straits includes it in a round-up of Jilin cuisine, or jicai (吉菜), and calls it a dish that turns up very often on Northeastern home tables.
Ingredients
The sour element is Northeastern suancai (东北酸菜), which in northern China normally means pickled Chinese cabbage. Chinese Wikipedia points out that this is not the same pickle as in Sichuan's pickled-cabbage fish (酸菜鱼): the Northeastern dish uses cabbage, the Sichuan one uses mustard greens.
To make the pickle, whole cabbages are dipped briefly in boiling water, laid in a vat in layers with a little salt, weighed down with a large stone and covered with water. In storage just above freezing, lactic-acid bacteria turn the sugars in the leaves into lactic acid, which keeps the cabbage from rotting. The other ingredients are simply pork belly and noodles.
How it is made
The pork belly is cut into thin slices and the sauerkraut into fine shreds, which are washed; Chinese Wikipedia notes that a pickled head is rinsed before use to take off some of the sourness. Stock is brought to the boil, then the pork, sauerkraut and noodles go in. The foam is skimmed off, and the pot is seasoned with salt, MSG and Sichuan-pepper water and simmered until everything is cooked.
Where it comes from
Chinese Wikipedia lists sauerkraut with blanched pork among the Northeastern dishes built on suancai, alongside sauerkraut with blood sausage and sauerkraut stewed with frozen tofu, and says the pickle is used mostly for stews.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.