How to cook JUICY Sweet & Sour Pork Ribs - No deep-frying!

Welcome to Spice and Pans. Subscribe to our channel for our recipes weekly. Hi and welcome to Spice and Pans. Today I'm going to show you this dish known as Tang Cu Pai Gu or literally means sweet vinegar pork ribs. What I have over here is 550 grams of spare ribs, pepper, one tablespoon of cornflour or cornstarch, two teaspoons of juice of ginger. All right, actually grate them and then squeeze out the juice. Two teaspoons over here, two teaspoons of a light soy sauce, one teaspoon of this baking soda. I like this to soften the meat and to tenderize it actually. For the sauce, I'll show you later what are needed. Okay so right now let's just marinate this first. We put in all these ingredients that are in front of us. I use ginger juice because basically I don't want the porkiness from the pork if you get what I mean. So the cornflour will actually give it a slightly crispy texture on the outside. So I'm going to mix them using my hand, massage all this into the meat. Mix them up well. Now the sauce is pretty straightforward. One third of a cup of water, one tablespoon of vinegar. You can use rice vinegar or any fruit vinegar if you want to. Half a teaspoon of salt, one tablespoon of this sugar, one teaspoon of a light soy sauce, two tablespoons of tomato ketchup. So for the vinegar again, that's one tablespoon of vinegar. You can use any vinegar if you want to, white vinegar. It cannot be black vinegar. Why is that because black vinegar, the taste is actually a little bit different from the white vinegar and when you cook the time, you will lose a lot of the tanginess actually. So we stay with white vinegar. Okay so let's mix all this up together. In goes the water, the vinegar, salt, sugar, the light soy sauce and the ketchup. Now there's no hard rules to how you want to make the sauce. If you like it more tangy, you can actually put in more vinegar if you want to. If you like it slightly darker, you can put in maybe half a tablespoon of this caramelized soy sauce or dark soy sauce. We just put this aside. Heat up your wok or your pan, run oil around the edges. Okay and just let it go down. Now I'm not going to put a lot of oil inside here but I'll make sure that I coat the wok with oil because I don't want the ribs to stick onto the pan. The pan has to be hot before I pan fry it so I'm waiting it to heat up first. Right now that the pan is hot, we'll put in the ribs piece by piece starting from this side. Now normally I don't like to move the ribs around until I've actually browned the side first. I'm just going to put them around. Remember that I put cornflour on the ribs so part of it might actually stick on the pan but that's okay. We can actually scrape it off later but if you want it actually crispier, I would suggest you actually to deep fry them. I'm just going to fry them approximately about three minutes on each side first before I flip them over. You'll start flipping them over to the other side. Very nicely charred. Now when I do shallow fry, it might take a little bit more time as compared to deep frying because of the bones out there. The trick is actually not to turn up the heat too high otherwise you'll actually burn the ribs actually. You just want to have a nice char and for it to be cooked inside. I'll keep flipping the sides because I don't want to actually burn them but I still want them cooked so I'll do this every two minutes or so just to make sure that they between the meat are actually cooked. Now apart from shallow frying like what I'm doing right now, of course you can do deep frying with oil that will be faster or another method that you can use is put them into the air and actually air fry them for approximately 180 degrees for like 15 to 20 minutes depending on the thickness of your meat. Now for those that don't have the bones one and they are cooked, I'll take them out first. While those with bones, I'll just let them cook a little bit longer so that the center will actually cook. So now we've done up all the ribs already, it's time to do the sauce. Pour the sauce in, stir them around a little bit, add in the ribs. Now we'll fry until the sauces are bright and absorbed by the ribs. This will take approximately like maybe about three minutes or so. Do not be worried about frying this because the longer you fry, the color will be actually nicer and glossier. In the meantime, I'll prepare one tablespoon of a Chinese cooking wine where you can see that the color is really really beautiful. When the sauce is almost dry, what we do is you pour the Hua Tiao Chiew around the wok to give an additional fragrance on the ribs. Smells really really good. Final touch, you put in some chopped spring onion to add color to it. All right and it's time to dish it out. Ladies and gentlemen, this is my version of the Tang Chu Pai Gu or sweet vinegar pork ribs. I hope you like our video, do click like on our video and do subscribe to our channel. Thank you for watching!