What it is
赤肉 (tshiah-bah), literally 'red meat', is the Taiwanese Hokkien word for lean pork. Here strips of it are marinated, coated and deep-fried, so they are crisp outside and tender inside. Ordered dry (乾赤肉), they come as a plate on their own. As 赤肉羹 they go into a thickened broth, often with noodles.
How it is made
Lean pork is cut into strips, massaged with a marinade, coated in flour and fried until golden. Control of the heat decides whether the crust stays light and the meat tender. For the soup, the fried strips go into a stock thickened with starch; on Cijin it is made with pork bones and cabbage, which give it a slight sweetness. Ordinary pork thick soup (肉羹) is different: minced lean and fatty pork is bound with fish paste, roughly 6:3:1, and boiled.
How to eat it
Order a bowl of the soup with yellow noodles (黃麵) or rice noodles (米粉), plus a plate of the dry pork to taste both versions. Vinegar or chilli sauce sharpens the soup. The dry pork is also eaten on its own as a snack.
Around Taiwan
- Kaohsiung
- On Cijin island, Bu Yi Yang (不一樣赤肉羹) fries same-day hind-leg pork for its soup, and the strips keep some crunch even after soaking in the broth. Its original shop on Zhongzhou 3rd Road, away from the main tourist strip, has traded for decades.
