Jar-Braised Pork 坛子肉
Jar-Braised Pork is featured among the local specialties of Shandong.
Jar-Braised Pork (坛子肉) is a Jinan (济南) dish of pork belly stewed slowly in a porcelain jar, which gives it its name. The China Local Conditions site of the national local-chronicles office, citing the Shandong provincial gazetteer site, calls it a famous Jinan dish dating from the Qing dynasty and says it is reputed to have been first made by the Fengjilou (凤集楼) restaurant in Jinan more than a century ago. Dazhong Daily's Haibao News calls it the Jinan meat dish most likely to rival the well-known bazi rou (把子肉).
How it is made
The chronicles office gives the classic recipe: pork belly cut into 2-centimetre cubes and blanched, then packed into a porcelain jar with soy sauce, rock sugar, cinnamon bark, spring onion, ginger and enough water to cover. The mouth of the jar is covered with a plate; the jar is brought to the boil over medium heat and then kept over a very low flame for about three hours until the meat is tender and the broth thick. It advises fine-skinned white pork rather than thick-skinned sow meat.
Xue's Sanba (薛氏三八) is a Jinan eatery founded in 1986 by Xue Depeng (薛德蓬), third-generation heir to the recipe of Xue Jifa (薛继法), a Fengjilou cook; Xue Wenjing (薛文静) and Xue Song (薛松) are the family's fifth-generation heirs to the recipe. There the pork is cut into blocks 4 centimetres square and 7 centimetres high, seasoned with more than 30 ground spices including cassia, angelica root, dried tangerine peel and Sichuan pepper, and rubbed by hand for 40 minutes. It then stews for three to four hours in earthenware jars more than 30 years old, according to Haibao News. The Xue family's jar-braised pork entered Jinan's municipal intangible heritage list in 2017.
Flavour and texture
The finished pork is red-brown and glossy. It is very tender without turning mushy and keeps its block shape without melting, and it is fat without being greasy; the rind is chewy and the lean meat is not dry. Haibao News describes it eaten hot with the meat and its juice poured over rice.
Where it comes from
Cooking meat in porcelain jars was widespread in Shandong in the Qing dynasty, and the chronicles office points to a line in the Qing writer Yuan Mei's (袁枚) cookbook Suiyuan Shidan (随园食单) about slow-cooking meat in a sealed porcelain jar set in rice husks. After Fengjilou closed in the 1930s its cooks moved to the Wenshengyuan (文升园) restaurant and carried on making the dish, which is how it spread.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.
Image credits & notes (1)
- A common version of Jar-Braised Pork · 坛子肉常见做法参考照片。Photo: gigijin from London, UK · CC BY-SA 2.0Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited.
