Also known as red-braising, red-stewing or flavor-potting, red-cooking is a traditional slow-braising technique that uses soy sauce, rice wine, and caramelized sugar to flavor the food and give it a dark red color. Other key ingredients include whole spices such as Szechuan peppercorn, star anise, black cardamom, cassia, and fennel seeds or the Chinese five-spice powder, all of which are to be used in moderation to avoid the flavors overpowering one another.

Basic flavor-potting is called lu and requires prolonged cooking over low heat. Completely submerged in cooking liquid, the food is slowly braised for up to several hours until tender and full of flavor while red-cooking hong shao style typically takes less than an hour and doesn't require much water.

Also, flavor-potting jiang style includes marinating the food in soy sauce and soybean paste prior to stewing. Red-cooking is believed to have originated in the Shanghai region, and it is most commonly associated with eastern Chinese cuisine, even though it is nowadays popular throughout the country.

Red-cooked dishes are traditionally heavy in meat content but they also often contain a variety of vegetables and sometimes even hard-boiled eggs. These dishes can be served hot or cold while the flavorful red broth is often repeatedly reused as master stock for poaching or braising meats in lou mei dishes which are typical for Cantonese and Fujian cuisines.