Tangsuyuk facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
Tangsuyuk

Place of origin	China (original) Korea (introduced)
Region or state	Incheon Chinatown
Associated national cuisine	Korean Chinese cuisine
Created by	Chinese immigrants in Korea
Serving temperature	Warm
Main ingredients	Pork or beef loin, sweet and sour sauce

Tangsuyuk (Hangul: 탕수육; Hanja: 糖醋肉) is a Korean Chinese meat dish with sweet and sour sauce. It can be made with either pork or beef.

History and etymology

Tangsuyuk is a dish that was first made by Chinese merchants in the port city of Incheon, where the majority of the ethnic Chinese population in contemporary South Korea live. It is derived from the Shandong-style dish tángcùròu (糖醋肉), as Chinese immigrants in Korea, including those that had first migrated to Northeastern China, mostly had Shandong ancestry.

Although the Chinese characters meaning "sugar" (糖), "vinegar" (醋), and "meat" (肉) are pronounced dang, cho, and yuk in Korean, the dish is called tangsuyuk, not dangchoyuk, because the word tangsu derived from the transliteration of Chinese pronunciation tángcù [tʰǎŋ.tsʰû], with the affricate c [tsʰ] in the second syllable weakened into fricative s [s].

The third syllable ròu (肉) was not transliterated, as Sino-Korean word yuk (Hangul: 육; Hanja: 肉) meaning "meat" was also commonly used in Korean dish names. As the word tangsuyuk is the combination of transliterated loanword tangsu and Sino-Korean yuk, it was not a Sino-Korean vocabulary that could be written in hanja. However, Koreans back-formed the second syllable with hanja su (Hangul: 수; Hanja: 水), meaning "water", perhaps because the sauce was considered soupy.

Preparation

Bite-size pieces of pork or beef loin are coated with batter, usually made by soaking a mixture of potato or sweet potato starch and corn starch in water for several hours and draining the excess water. Glutinous rice flour may also be used. Egg white or cooking oil is added to the batter to change its consistency. Similarly to other Korean deep fried dishes, battered tangsuyuk meat is double-fried.

Tangsuyuk is served with sweet and sour sauce, which is typically made by boiling vinegar, sugar and water, with variety of fruits and vegetables like carrot, cucumber, onion, water chestnut, wood ear mushroom and pineapple. Starch slurry is used to thicken the sauce.

Gallery

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  Beoseot-tangsuyuk, a vegan/vegetarian tangsuyuk dish using shiitake mushroom as a meat substitute