Cooking: Hot and Sour Pork Tripe

I ate hot and sour pork tripe plenty of times as a kid, but it was only today that I found out it’s actually a Henan dish.

True or not, as someone from Henan it felt pretty much mandatory to learn how to make one of the “Henan dishes.”

The method for hot and sour pork tripe isn’t exactly simple, though it isn’t hard either:

Ingredients:

1. Pork tripe
2. Chilies
3. Ginger, vinegar, chili oil, Shaoxing wine
4. Stock (lamb, beef, or bone broth all work)
5. Cornstarch, white pepper, chicken bouillon

First bring the stock to a boil, drop in the chopped tripe and simmer it briefly, then fish it out. Set the stock aside too, don’t toss it.

Add a little oil to the wok and swirl it around, then add the ginger and chilies and fry until fragrant. Add the tripe you just set aside, stir it around briefly, then pour in the stock. Add the Shaoxing wine and white pepper and let it braise.

Braise for about 5 minutes, thicken with cornstarch, then season with vinegar and chicken bouillon. Once it’s thickened, add the red chili oil — purely to give the tripe a bit of red color and make it look nicer.

Then it’s ready to serve. You can also stir-fry some napa cabbage beforehand as a bed for it, which looks better, but I’m lazy, so I skipped it.

Taste-wise it’s not far off from what you get in restaurants. As a Henan native, I’d say I passed.