Oliver Wang is a professor and occasional NPR music reviewer — not a professional cook. But he's spent years trying to perfect a common Chinese dish: hongshao rou, or red-braised pork.

"It's actually more of a deep brown, made from bite-sized morsels of pork belly, layered with skin, fat and meat, all deliciously braised in a salty, sweet sauce to become melt-in-your-mouth tender," he says.

In search of a recipe, he turned to his friend Gary Wang, a pork aficionado and restaurant owner in Shanghai. Gary says few places outside of China know how to make the dish correctly. They either slice the pork too thinly or add cornstarch to thicken the sauce.

The key, Gary says, is to use two different types of soy sauce — light and dark. The light, sheng chou, is the most common one used in Chinese cooking but is not the same thing as low-sodium brands sold in the U.S. Sheng chou is actually saltier than the dark, lao chou, which is thicker and sweetened.

"Lao chou basically gives the meat a dark color instead of the saltiness," Gary says.

Despite his expert opinions, Gary doesn't actually serve hongshao rou at his restaurant, The Grumpy Pig, because he doesn't have the right gas stoves to make it, he says. But you can still steal his recipe below.