Yuxiang Shredded Pork

01

Fish-fragrant, with no fish

The fish in the name is a flavor, not an ingredient.

A plate of yuxiang shredded pork is thin slivers of pork loin, tender and coated in a thin, glossy red sauce, mixed with slivers of wood ear fungus and a crunchy vegetable cut the same way. It tastes salty first, then sweet and sour together, with a gentle heat and a strong smell of garlic, ginger and scallion. The color is orange-red, and it is eaten with plenty of rice.

The two characters 鱼香 mean “fish” and “fragrant,” which is why the Sichuan cooking writer Fuchsia Dunlop translates the name as fish-fragrant pork slivers. English-language menus have tried “mock-fish,” “fish-flavored” and even “sea-spice,” which makes little sense for a province hundreds of miles from the sea. The historian Lan Yong counts it among the traditional Sichuan dishes, alongside twice-cooked pork, mapo tofu and kung pao chicken, and dates it to the Republican period. The Chengdu historian Yuan Tingdong argues that when people think of Sichuan food, three dishes should come to mind: twice-cooked pork, mapo tofu and yuxiang shredded pork. It is also on the list of nineteen representative Sichuan dishes in the reference work Zhongguo Shijing (中国食经), which he quotes.

The Chengdu food writer Shi Guanghua puts the fish-fragrant flavor next to kung pao and strange-flavor as the textbook cases of Sichuan seasoning, the dishes a cook has to understand before the rest makes sense. He once wrote that a cook who can do fish-fragrant well can cook for the whole world. He also complains that it has become hard to find: cooks who can stir-fry a decent yuxiang shredded pork, he writes, are now rare enough to be listed as intangible cultural heritage.

Sources [1][2][3][5]

02

Why it is called fish-fragrant

鱼香 is the name of a seasoning: the mix Sichuan cooks used for fish, later used on pork.

When Sichuan home cooks braised fish, they used a set seasoning: pickled red chilies, ginger, garlic and scallion, with sugar, vinegar and soy sauce, which together give a sauce that is sour, sweet, salty, savory and gently spicy. That combination was made for fish. Cooks then found that it was just as good on pork, and began using the same seasoning to stir-fry pork slivers. The dish was called fish-fragrant pork slivers because it is pork in the fish seasoning; there was never any fish in it. Dunlop writes that this fish seasoning is where the flavor comes from, and that everyone agrees it grew out of home cooking before restaurant chefs took it up. The Sichuan cooking teacher Liu Guangfu gives yuxiang shredded pork as a standard example of a dish named after its seasoning, as mapo tofu is named after a person.

Fish is still cooked that way. Shi Guanghua describes Sichuan bean-paste fish, braised with chili bean paste, pickled chilies, scallion, ginger, garlic and a sweet-sour finish, and says its taste is close to a broad fish-fragrant flavor. Once the seasoning had its own name, Sichuan cooks used it on pork, eggplant, chicken, eggs and tofu.

Two other explanations circulate, and neither holds up well. One says the pickled chilies were once called fish chilies, 鱼辣子, because live crucian carp were put in the pickling jar; an old Sichuan chef repeats it on camera. Shi Guanghua, who has written a whole book on Sichuan chilies, calls the carp in the jar a gimmick and a half-true legend. He uses the word 鱼辣子 himself, for erjingtiao chilies pickled whole, mainly for fish-fragrant dishes, and argues that what matters is how sour, sweet, fragrant and crisp the pickled chilies are, not a fish in the jar. The other is a story about fishermen who caught nothing in days of rain and fried pork with their fish seasonings instead. It is a story, not a record.

Sources [1][5][6][11]

03

Salty, sweet, sour and spicy

鱼香味, the fish-fragrant flavor, is one of the twenty-odd compound flavors Sichuan cooks name and teach.

Lan Yong lists more than twenty such compound flavors, from home-style and numbing-hot to lychee, strange-flavor and fish-fragrant. Liu Guangfu’s textbook defines fish-fragrant as bright red, salty and savory with a mild heat, sweet and sour together, with a strong smell of ginger, scallion and garlic. Dunlop’s description is the same in other words. The core is pickled red chili, which gives these dishes their orange-red color. The difficulty is the balance: no one taste should stick out. Liu puts it as a rule for sugar in every compound flavor: it should round the dish out without the dish tasting sweet.

Liu also fixes the cuts. The pickled chilies are seeded and chopped to a very fine paste. The scallion is cut into “fish-eye” rounds about half a centimeter long, small enough to scatter through the sauce, and he says every fish-fragrant dish must have ginger, scallion, garlic and pickled chili. Garlic outweighs ginger: in his recipe, 15 grams of garlic to 5 of ginger.

Sources [1][3][6][9][10]

04

The sauce ratio: spoon formulas and a chef’s grams

The question people ask most about this dish is how much of each seasoning goes into the sauce.

Chinese recipe sites answer with number formulas in spoonfuls. The common “1-2-3-4” is one spoon of rice wine, two of soy sauce, three of sugar and four of vinegar. “1-2-3-4-5” adds five spoons of water or stock, though some versions give the numbers to different seasonings, so the formula means different things on different sites. Others circulate “5-4-3-2-1” and “4-3-2-1-1-1.” They are memory aids, and they are not wrong as a starting point, but all of them use far more soy sauce than chefs do.

The chefs’ versions agree on two things: sugar and vinegar in roughly equal weight, and very little soy sauce. In Liu Guangfu’s textbook recipe, 200 grams of pork loin takes 25 grams each of sugar and vinegar but only 5 grams of soy sauce and 2 of salt; the pickled chilies supply the rest of the salt and the color. Equal sugar and vinegar, little soy, plenty of garlic: that is the shape of the sauce. Because vinegars differ in strength, every chef also tastes and adjusts at the end.

Sources [6][8][9][10]

05

Wood ear and bamboo shoot, not carrot

What goes in besides pork is where versions part ways.

Zheng Shaowu, who joined Beijing’s Sichuan Restaurant at seventeen and spent his working life there, says the traditional garnish is only winter bamboo shoot and wood ear. The carrot, bell pepper, celery and green beans that many restaurants add hold too much water, and the dish turns watery. Liu Guangfu’s textbook gives the regional rule: in western Sichuan, around Chengdu, the garnish is dried “magnolia” bamboo slices, 玉兰片, with wood ear; across Sichuan and Chongqing it is lettuce stem, 莴笋, with wood ear. His own recipe uses 50 grams each of lettuce stem and wood ear to 200 grams of pork. Whatever is used is cut into slivers to match the pork: as Sichuan cooks say, cubes go with cubes and slivers with slivers.

Elsewhere the dish drifts. In 1997 a Beijing newspaper reporter ordered yuxiang shredded pork at ten small Sichuan restaurants in the city and found six different methods; the most extreme cook said that anything stir-fried with chili counts. Many versions outside Sichuan add carrot and green pepper, and some kitchens use chili bean paste or fresh chili in place of the pickled chilies. The plate at the top of this page is a home-style version of that kind, with lettuce stem, green pepper, carrot and wood ear.

Sources [1][2][6][9]

06

How chefs make it

Sources [6][8][9]

07

Fish-fragrant, Beijing-sauce or green-pepper pork?

Three of the commonest pork-sliver dishes on a Chinese menu are cooked the same way and seasoned differently.

Liu Guangfu’s textbook lists yuxiang shredded pork, green-pepper shredded pork and Beijing-sauce shredded pork, 京酱肉丝, one after another, all made by the same quick stir-fry of starch-coated pork slivers. What separates them is the seasoning. Beijing-sauce pork is fried with sweet bean sauce and a little sugar, has no vinegar and no chili, and is served on raw scallion slivers; green-pepper pork is simply salty and savory. Only the fish-fragrant version is sweet, sour and spicy at once.

Ordering abroad, the name changes. Many American Chinese restaurants list the dish as shredded pork with garlic sauce, a loose translation that the recipe writer Maggie Zhu of Omnivore’s Cookbook says is the name to look for in authentic Sichuan restaurants in the United States. On other menus it is fish-fragrant pork, fish-flavored shredded pork or simply yu xiang rou si.

Sources [6][7]

08

What it costs, and other fish-fragrant dishes

It is one of the cheapest meat dishes on a Sichuan menu.

In 2026 a small back-street restaurant in Chongqing sold yuxiang shredded pork for 14 yuan a plate. When the documentary maker Chen Xiaoqing was a student in Beijing in the 1980s, the snack counter of the Sichuan Restaurant on Xirongxian Hutong charged nine jiao for it, the same as kung pao chicken. Chen also remembers it as a staple of the university canteen. Today it is a standard of canteens, rice-plate shops and lunch boxes across China, often served over rice as a one-dish meal.

The same seasoning dresses other dishes. Fish-fragrant eggplant, braised soft in the same sauce, is the best-known after the pork, and Sichuan menus also have fish-fragrant chicken slivers served cold, fish-fragrant bean curd and fish-fragrant eggplant cakes, slices of eggplant sandwiched with meat and fried. Liu Guangfu’s list adds fish-fragrant eight-piece chicken, fish-fragrant garlic shoots and fish-fragrant “buddha’s-hand” rolls. In upscale restaurants the sauce is now poured over fried prawns and other seafood, a recent addition that came once fresh seafood could be flown in from the coast. Sichuan’s Muslim restaurants, which serve no pork, make the dish with beef as fish-fragrant beef slivers.

Sources [1][2][4][6][12]

09

At home

Sources [1][6][10]

10

More Sichuan stir-fries