MUZIChinese Matrix
Steaming · FFET10218
Pork belly coated in toasted, coarsely ground rice and spices, then steamed until soft.
A small round white porcelain bowl has pork belly coated in brown ground short-grain and glutinous rice, star anise, fennel seeds, Sichuan peppercorns, bay leaves and cinnamon, with wooden chopsticks resting beside the bowl.
Cooking food with steam in a steamer.
Fen zheng rou is pork belly coated in toasted, coarsely ground rice and spices and steamed until soft. The Qing-dynasty cookbook Suiyuan Shidan by Yuan Mei includes half-fat, half-lean pork mixed with rice toasted yellow and steamed over cabbage, classifying it as a Jiangxi people's dish. A competing Hubei origin claim appears in an entry tagged as lacking sources. The accounts differ, so this entry takes neither side and gives no year.
Fen zheng rou is pork belly coated in toasted, coarsely ground rice and spices and then steamed soft. Sichuan versions often marinate the pork with doubanjiang.1,5
Yuan Mei's Qing-dynasty cookbook Suiyuan Shidan already gives a method: half-fat, half-lean pork mixed with rice toasted to a yellow color and steamed over cabbage. The consulted entry gives no year for the book, and the listed materials contain no earlier dated record.2
The Jiangxi origin claim rests on Yuan Mei's description of a Jiangxi people's dish, also used in a 2015 English-language magazine article. The dish is found in Hubei, Jiangxi, Hunan and Sichuan. A competing Hubei origin claim appears in an entry tagged as lacking sources; the origins remain disputed here.1,2,3
Both recipes are adaptations. One is Sichuan-style: rice and glutinous rice are toasted with spices and ground coarse, the pork is marinated with doubanjiang, soy sauce, rice wine, oyster sauce, egg and sesame oil, coated in the rice and steamed over cubed sweet potato for 50 to 60 minutes. The other uses five-spice powder and taro, marinates the pork overnight and steams it for about 2.5 hours.5,6
Steaming without letting water show preserves the meat's flavor.2
Steaming food in rice flour is common in Sichuan, Hunan and Hubei, and flour steaming is one of the 9 steaming methods tied to Tianmen cooking.4
Legend has it that the Chongzhen Emperor ate fen zheng rou at an inn run by the Ding family in Henan and came to like the dish.
Told in: A 2015 article in an English-language magazine, which presents it as a folk legend set in Henan.
Legend has it that the rebel leaders Wang Kuang and Wang Feng, short of food at Jingling (today's Tianmen in Hubei), ground grain into flour, mixed it with wild greens and steamed it, and that the method spread as Tianmen steamed dishes. The tale is about steaming food in flour in general and does not name fen zheng rou.
Told in: A 2019 health report by a Taiwanese media outlet (updated 2022), which gives no date for the tale.
Grandma Li
This is a simplified home version, not the traditional restaurant method.
Fen zheng rou is made differently in different places, and both recipes I draw on are adaptations: one is a Sichuan recipe by a named author, with doubanjiang and a sweet potato base; the other is a signed recipe by a chef in a food broadcaster's recipe section, with five-spice powder and a taro base. This is my home version and it mostly follows the former: the rice amounts and the steaming time come from it, while the amounts of the spices and the marinade seasonings are my own choices at home. A cup is a US cup, about 240 ml.
Allergens: soy, wheat, shellfish, egg, sesame
