Is There a Lighter, Brighter, Sweet-and-Sour Pork?

Get the recipe for Cantonese Sweet-and-Sour Pork here: bit.ly/4haAxz2
Sweet-and-sour pork isn’t necessarily gloopy! Or intensely sweet! Or soggy. In Hong Kong, you can find a more traditional version that’s much brighter, with crisp veggies and lightly-battered meat, coated in a naturally tangy-sweet sauce.
At the Brother Seafood Restaurant, our editorial director J.M. Hirsch learned to make a sauce flavored with hawthorne berries, a crabapple-­like fruit that defined the sweet-and-sour flavors before British colonialism. And they kept the flavors clear and distinct by cooking all of the ingredients briefly, and separately: hunks of bone-in pork ribs with a potato starch slurry, briefly wok-fried. Then vegetables, only briefly flashed over heat; then the sauce, reduced on its own; then everything tossed together at the end, with just enough sauce to barely coat the ingredients.
“This cooking method also left the bell pepper and pineapple tasting fresh and crisp,” J.M. wrote. “And briefly simmering the sauce reduced and concentrated it on its own, no gluey cornstarch needed. This meant a cleaner, crisper flavor and a far better texture.”
“It was fascinating the way the ingredients collaborated to make a better and lighter dish, even though they actually spent little time in the wok together,” he wrote.
We found that apple jelly was the perfect substitute for the hard-to-find hawthorn berries, and we kept our pork light and crisp by pan-frying with just a thin cornstarch coating.
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