Steamed Pork with Rice Flour 粉蒸肉
Steamed Pork with Rice Flour is featured among the local specialties of Yunnan.
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Steamed Pork with Rice Flour (粉蒸肉) is pork belly coated in seasoned ground rice and steamed until tender. The dish is a speciality of central-southern China, but in Kunming (昆明) the local version, known as Old Kunming steamed pork (老昆明粉蒸肉), is counted among the classic dishes of Yunnan cooking and belongs to the city's New Year table.
How it is made
Chinese Wikipedia traces the dish to Hubei cooking and describes the basic method: pork belly is mixed with spices and ground rice (米粉) and steamed right through. The spices change from region to region.
Where it comes from
Old Kunming steamed pork was one of the ten classic famous dishes named in Yunnan's provincial awards for Yunnan cuisine, announced in March 2025 at the 12th Weishan snack festival in Dali. A few months earlier the Kunming Commerce Bureau had put steamed pork with rice flour on its shortlist of 30 famous dishes of Chunchen (春城, 'Spring City', Kunming's nickname) for 2024.
The Yunnan Daily lists Kunming's steamed pork beside Kunming thousand-layer pork (千张肉) and eight-treasure rice (八宝饭) among the classics of the Yunnan New Year meal. In a Kunming Information Port report on old New Year customs, a Kunming resident names it among the hearty dishes once eaten only at New Year and other festivals that are now common on everyday tables. It was also on the menu of the Yunnan Hotel (云南饭店), which opened in 1962 as a Yunnan provincial government guesthouse and was pulled down in 2010.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.