Pork with Green Beans in Sweet Sauce

Preparing the meat and vegetables

1. Meat with green beans in sweet sauce works better with lean meat. Shoulder or leg is ideal. Pork neck, because of its high fat content, is better avoided.

   It is best to use small whole pods of dried chili peppers in this dish. They give a certain aroma and only a very slight heat, just a hint. This is optional: if you are afraid of heat or do not like it, you can leave out the hot pepper. We add such pepper to some of our home dishes, and we like it. For example, meat with corn, when you add the pepper, becomes quite aromatic with a pleasant heat, right at the edge of perception.

2. Prepare the pork: trim off large layers of fat and, if possible, remove the membranes and bones. Cut into walnut-sized pieces.

   

3. Prepare the onion and beans. Peel the onion and cut it into thick strips or cubes. The pieces of onion should clearly stand out in the finished dish, so do not chop them finely. The dish is especially tasty if the onion is fried until almost completely done, but with a barely perceptible firm center.

   Frozen green beans work fine out of vegetable season. Pork in sweet sauce is an all-season dish. If you can, use fresh green beans, first removing the tips and the ribs, which are like tough threads. If the pods are long, cut them into 4-5 cm pieces.

Stir-frying

1. Fry the pork until half done. Heat the vegetable oil in a wok, saucepan or ordinary frying pan and let it warm up for 1-2 minutes. Fry over high heat, stirring constantly, for 7-8 minutes.

   

   Pork, like any meat when fried, will release a little liquid. The liquid evaporates quickly, but until then the meat will be stewing rather than frying. So the frying time for the meat may turn out slightly longer.

   

2. Add the spices: season the fried pork lightly with pepper, add 8-10 whole Sichuan peppercorns and whole pods of dried hot pepper, if you decided to use it. Sichuan pepper is the husks of the fruit of a small tree of the rue family, a characteristic spice of Chinese cooking with a slightly hot, lemony taste. It is widely sold in supermarkets.

   Note: do not salt yet. Soy sauce is quite salty, so the pork in sweet sauce may end up oversalted.

3. Fry the meat with the onion. Stir the meat, add the cut onion and keep frying over high heat, stirring often, until the onion is soft and slightly browned, that is, it starts to fry.

   

5. Fry the meat with the beans. Add the prepared green beans to the meat; frozen ones do not need to be thawed. Stir and fry everything together for about 5 minutes. If possible, do not cover the meat and vegetables to stew at this stage; they should fry. During the simmering that follows, the beans will cook through.

   

Sweet sauce and simmering

1. Make the sweet sauce. In a cup, mix 1 tbsp of wheat flour (10 g) (level), 1 tbsp of brown sugar (14 g) (heaped) and a pinch of ground dried ginger.

   

   Stir the mixture until smooth and add the light natural soy sauce. Mix everything thoroughly. The consistency should be a thin batter. Thin it further with boiled water at room temperature. The flour mixture should pour freely from the cup.

   

2. Pour the sauce over the meat. While stirring the meat and vegetables, pour in the flour mixture in a thin stream. The sauce starts thickening at once, so add as much of the mixture as you need, by eye, for the thickness you want.

3. Simmer over the lowest heat for 5-6 minutes, stirring from time to time. The meat and beans will be done by then. The sauce should barely bubble, right at the edge of simmering, or the flour will simply burn. At the end, taste and add salt if needed.

Serving

1. Serve hot right away, while the pork has not cooled. If you like, add a pinch of coarsely ground hot pepper pod.

   

   The dish is not difficult; the only thing is not to get distracted and to stir the ingredients often while frying. The total cooking time, not counting cutting the ingredients, is about half an hour. That makes it possible to cook this dish for dinner after work.

   

   Meat with green beans in sweet sauce can easily be eaten with chopsticks, if you know how or are used to them. Large pieces of meat, onion and beans are easy to pick up with chopsticks.