Quite different in other places where it is not always just a dressing but also a accompanying sauce for fish and meat, and sometimes a dressing for fruit and vegetable salads.
Among the most popular sweet and sour sauces in China is undoubtedly the one based on chili and soy sauce, often intended as a dipping sauce for shrimp, or the one based on rice vinegar and garlic for duck. In other recipes, such as Cantonese sweet and sour pork or sweet and sour lobster meatballs, the sauce is used as a finishing touch during the last few minutes of cooking in a wok.
But not all Chinese dishes are cooked, and in some, sweet and sour sauce is used as a dressing. This is the case, for example, with the fruit and vegetable salad prepared in eastern regions of China, where the sweet and sour sauce dress cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, peppers, and pineapple. Even more recent Chinese cuisine retains recipes with creative ideas from renowned national and international chefs, where they replace sugar with candied cane sugar or add ketchup or Worcestershire sauce.
Personally, I think that adding ketchup, also used by the Hong Kong chef Willie Mak, is up to date with the times and more adaptable to dishes where sweet and sour sauce is required in the kitchen.
