Lu Rou Fan is a Taiwanese pork stew served over rice. I tweaked this recipe to make it meal prep friendly, and show how to make soy-sauce eggs and a bok choy soup in parallel.

Time: 5/5
Be prepared to be at the stove for more than two hours – you can telescope tasks within that time, but a stew just needs time to stew.

Effort: 4/5
My decision to make this on a weeknight was … unwise.

A three-course meal prep bonanza

Lu Rou Fan (滷肉飯, or stewed-pork-rice) is a Taiwanese recipe that involves stewing pork in a soy sauce-based sauce until it becomes super tender and flavourful, then ladling it over plenty of rice. With a few modifications, it’s a recipe that lends itself well to meal prep!

I had the fortune to spend a week at Taipei, including a few days at the hot spring resort town of Beitou. There I heard that back in the pre-industrial days, lu rou fan was the favourite breakfast of farmhands and labourers who needed a filling and hearty meal to get them through a hard day of work.

Here are several examples of lu rou fan I had in Taiwan. The one of the left was at the airport, while the middle and right were at a market and a street stall respectively. The one on the right also came with a lu dan (滷蛋), or an egg stewed in a soy sauce-based liquid. On close inspection (especially the middle picture), you can see why this makes a good choice for someone who works with their hands and spends all day on their feet.

Traditional lu rou fan is made using pork belly. The skin has plenty of collagen, which breaks down into gelatin and gives the stew a rich, luscious, lip-smacking texture. In addition to that, the lard renders out and mixes with the soy sauce and the rice to create a truly phenomenal eating experience.

If you like the sauce and the flavour profile, but want a simpler and less involved meal prep process, go check out these Lu Rou Fan-inspired steak bites!

The Meal Prep Friendly Tweak

At its core, lu rou fan is a pork stew over rice, and stews over rice are very meal prep friendly in general. You can just imagine lunch ladies lording over massive stew pots of Lu rou fan, stirring every once in a while, making hundreds of meals at a time with the same time it takes to make one. Which means that with a few tweaks to make it more macro friendly, it’s a good way to make a lot of food at once.

That is, if you have all afternoon to spare. It simply takes time for collagen to break down into gelatine, which means that recipes like these have a hard time cost baked into them by the very nature of their ingredients.

A Taiwanese farmhand has to burn through a bazillion calories a day, and needs all the energy they can get. I, on the other hand, spend all day with my ass in a chair in an air conditioned office. Which means that lu rou fan is most decidedly not an every day food for me.

So, in order to turn it into a reasonable Tuesday lunch, I substitute pork belly for shoulder. Besides much more protein per calorie there’s still plenty connective tissue to break down into gelatine, and enough fat to keep things reasonably juicy. The loss of richness from giving up the fat is just one of those sacrifices I choose to make. Save the real deal for a special occasion – not every meal has to be gourmet.

One way I try to make the time investment worth it is by telescoping the tasks within the stew time for the pork. Because the lu rou portion of lu rou fan takes so long, you can wait until the stew has started simmering before making your rice, you could do a lot of prep and cleaning done, and still have time to cook side dishes to turn this meal prep into a multi-course feast.

Side Dish Extravaganza

Another meal-prep friendly adaptation is not for the ingredients or the technique, but rather with time management. Since stewing pork in a sauce until it becomes tender imposes a fixed time cost on the recipe, there’s a roughly 90 minute window where you can nest other tasks into the time it takes to wait for the lu rou to be done. This is when you can make side dishes, make the rice, do some cleaning and get some of the dishes done.

Soy Sauce Braised Eggs

The soy sauce braised egg (lu dan / 滷蛋) is an easy way to add contrasting textures, flavours and colours to an otherwise homogeneous dish. The way it’s done is by peeling hard boiled eggs, then plunking them right into the pan to stew along with the pork for an hour or more.

The prolonged stewing infuses the eggs with the savoury flavour of the sauce, and also colours them a bit, like ramen eggs. And before you get worried about the dreaded green ring of death around the yolks from cooking the eggs that long, check out how they turned out:

Bok Choy Soup

Delicious as eggs are, the marinated eggs paled in comparison to the stroke of genius that led me to make a meatball soup to go along with this meal. After blanching all my Bok choy, I was left with what was basically a huge pot of vegetable broth. All it needed was some aromatics, some savouriness and salt to become a simple but satisfying soup. After all, Bok choy soup is absolutely a thing.

Waste not want not, I say, channeling an almost-forgotten memory of my father making vegetable and meatball soup for us when mom was out of town. All it took was some ground pork, corn starch, some seasonings and a bit of kneading and shaping to make some simple meatballs to add to the broth. Hey, it’s going to be an hour before the lu rou is ready, so might as well make the most of the time!

Now, is my version of lu rou fan as good as the traditional one? I would never dream of making such a claim. Lard is just too delicious. But this version is one that I can have for lunch all week.

Dramatis Personae

Served 11(!)

Lu Rou (soy sauce braised pork)

Pork – 1200g

1200g is a bit less than I would usually use for 11 portions, but the meatball soup and the egg partially makes up for the missing protein. In addition, after a week of gluttony on a vacation I kind of want to reel things back a bit afterwards. You feel me?

Like I said earlier, I’m using pork shoulder instead of pork belly to make this a more every day sort of meal. I won’t go with a super lean cut like pork loin, because it won’t be able to stand up to the prolonged stewing without going dry and tough.

Whether you go with ground pork or diced pork is a matter of personal choice. While ground pork would take less time to cook, I prefer diced pork because the chunkier texture gives the sauce a heartier feel. I am fortunate to be able to buy pork already diced and frozen, but you can dice your own pork with a cleaver and some elbow grease.

Aromatics

Shallots – Use much, much more shallots than you see me use. The toasty, sweet flavours that develop when you fry shallots in oil are key to lu rou fan! I thought 5 shallots would be plenty for 11 portions, but truth be told I could have used 10 times the amount. That much was clear when I tasted my own and compared it to my memory of the really good lu rou fan I had on my trip. Better yet, go to the store and buy one of those huge jars of fried shallots and dump it all into the sauce. Thank me later.

Garlic – A couple cloves, just for the hint of garlickyness. Lu rou fan is a shallot sauce and a meat sauce in equal measure, while garlic only plays a supporting role.

Sugar – a teaspoon per portion. You might not think of it as an aromatic, but we’re going to caramelise this and create all sorts of toasty and nutty flavours. You need a considerable amount, enough for the sauce to taste noticeably sweet. A similar technique is at play when making Three Cup Chicken, if you want a closer look..

Bay leaves – A couple dried bay leaves. You might not notice their presence, but you sure would notice their absence.

Spices – A couple teaspoons each of five spice powder and white pepper, to round the flavours out. You might need more or less, depending on how potent your spices are and how potent you want your sauce to be. As always, season to taste.

Sauce

I really can’t give exact amounts here. If I were to hazard a guess, I added 3 parts light soy sauce to 1 part each of dark soy sauce, oyster sauce and rice wine. There was maybe 300ml of that mixture in the pan by the time I went ahead and added enough water to cover the meat.

I eyeball the amounts and judge by colour – when the contents of the pan have been stained a nice dark colour, I guess I’m good to go. You could try to guess the amount you need by calculating how much sodium you’re adding to the pan with the various ingredients, but truth be told the exact proportions don’t matter. This is a recipe with very wide tolerances, and the flavours change a lot over the 2 hour stewing process (or maybe I’m just too chaotic in the kitchen).

Lu Dan (soy sauce braised eggs)

Eggs – 5.

You might ask, 5 eggs for 11 portions? How does that work out? Well, each portion gets half an egg and one meal will have to do without. Boo hoo. I’d rather have a little less than more in this situation, having half an egg sitting around in the fridge risks it going bad while it’s waiting for a meal to join. But that’s just me.

These are going to be hard boiled, peeled, then tossed into the pork sauce to be stewed with all the other ingredients where they’ll pick up some delicious meaty flavours. The yolk isn’t going to be jammy, but the upgrade in taste is going to be well worth the sacrifice.

Bok choy and meatball soup

This begins with the already-hot water from hard-boiling the eggs. Always look for ways to synergise, in the kitchen and in life.

Ginger – a few slices

Peel them or not, it doesn’t matter. Toss them into the water as soon as the eggs come out, and let them steep. They will perfume the broth as I blanch the Bok choy and boil the meatballs.

Baby Bok choy – 1200g

Always eat your veggies! A 1:1 ratio by weight of vegetables and meat is a decent starting point. When in doubt, err on the side of more vegetables – goodness knows most of us don’t have nearly enough vegetables most of the time.

I salted the water lightly and blanched the Bok choy in batches, reserving them to serve on the side. I didn’t let them sit in the hot broth until serving, because if so they would continue to soften and soften, until the texture turns into mush.

Meatballs

Ground pork – about 3/4 pound of ground pork shoulder, or 300g.

A fattier mix would result in juicier meatballs but more calories, so you have to make the call on where to draw the line for yourself. I mixed in the other ingredients and knead the whole thing by hand for a couple minutes until it turned into a paste, then rolled them into little balls and plonked them into the boiling water. They’ll float once they’re done, which is really cute!

Seasonings – to taste

It’s tricky to season a raw meatball mix to taste, but fortunately the meatballs are there mainly to give the broth more depth and body rather than having to play the main character. I added about a tablespoon of soy sauce, 2 teaspoons of corn starch and 1 teaspoon of white pepper to the meatball mix.

Garnishes

As you might know, pretty food tastes better. It’s well worth the effort to make your food look nice, even if you’re just cooking for yourself. I’ve found that sometimes food gets monotonous when you meal prep, and it helps to have a well-presented bento box to look forward to.

Here I added some pickled dashi daikon radishes, simply because I had them on hand. The pop of yellow colour they provide to an otherwise homogeneously brown dish is also welcome. It’s a similar concept to adding a hot-spring egg over a bowl of Bolognese over rice.

In general, any form of sour, sharp tasting pickle will do well to elevate this dish – especially if you can get your hands on some pickled mustard greens.

Executive summary

1. Wash, cut or otherwise prepare the aromatics and garnishes.
2. Brown the pork in a pan, in batches if needed.
3. Once pork is all browned, sauté shallots until browned, then add garlic and spices. Add sugar to pan and allow it to melt.
4. Once sugar has melted, return pork to the pan and add sauce ingredients. Add enough water to cover, and bring the pan to a simmer and cover.
5. In the meantime, bring a pot of water to boil. Wash vegetables. Make rice.
6. Make hard-boiled eggs by boiling eggs for about 8 minutes and allow to cool. Blanche vegetables in batches. Once eggs are cool enough to handle, peel them and add them to the pan to simmer with the pork.
7. Add several slices of ginger to the pot and bring the vegetable blanching liquid to a rolling boil.
8. Mix corn starch, soy sauce and white pepper into ground pork and knead until a sticky paste forms. Roll the mixture in your hands until meatballs form, and plop them into the pot.
9. Once the meatballs float, or after about 10 minutes of vigorous boiling, shut the heat off and season to taste. Put a lid on the pot to keep the soup warm.
10. Clean up while waiting for the pork to stew. Once pork is tender, after about 90 minutes of simmering, assemble the meal and serve.

Play by Play

How I cut shallots. I take the top and the tail off, which lets me stand them upright on their now flat bottoms. I then bisect them, and take the skin off along with the first layer. It seems a bit wasteful, but the first layer often tastes papery anyway, and it’s much quicker that way.

Starting off by slicing and dicing. The first steps of Lu Rou Fan are like a stir fry, so it pays to be organised. I cut the pickles too while I was at it, to get all the knife work out of the way.

I wash my vegetables to get all the dirt off of them. Pay particular attention to the junction between the leaves and the stem. This reminds me that I need to put water to boil in my biggest pot, to blanche these later.

These eggs need to be hard-boiled and peeled before being stewed in the meat sauce, so into the pot they go. These should be done 8 or 9 minutes after the water comes up to a boil.

The fun begins. Briefly cook the pork on medium heat. I’m working in two batches, simply because there isn’t much space in my pan. Don’t worry too much about browning, it’s not essential for this dish. I just want it to not be raw on the outside.

Reserve the pork once it’s done. Some pork fat has rendered out, which is perfect for sautéing the shallots and other aromatics with. After the aromatics have had a chance to brown a bit, I added the sugar and let that melt into a puddle of caramel.

Here’s what it looks like after I added the sauce ingredients and the white pepper (because I forgot to add them with the shallots). Give everything a toss so the pork gets coated with the caramel and the various liquids, add enough water to barely cover, then put a lid over everything and let it simmer. Peel the eggs and toss them in.

At the very bottom of my oyster sauce – no worries, I’ll just rinse it out. However much is in there will have to be enough. It doesn’t matter too much, recipes like this one are pretty forgiving with the ratios and proportions of ingredients.

While the pork has been stewing, I’ve been blanching my vegetables in several batches. After everything is done, I was left with this big pot of what is essentially Bok choy broth.

Here are my impromptu meatballs: ground pork with some soy sauce, white pepper and corn starch. Knead together until pasty and sticky, then rolled into little balls. The meat sauce takes ages to simmer, so there’s plenty of time to work in parallel.

A slice or two of ginger goes in while I bring the pot back up to a boil, to start infusing the broth. The meatballs go in one by one as I work, and they tell you they’re done by floating up to the top! It only takes a couple of minutes at a rolling boil. Taste and adjust seasoning at this point.

About time too, because the meat has been going for 2 hours at this point. Taste and adjust the meat sauce for seasoning as well.

Any more portions, and I would literally run out of table!

It’s time to eat! Dinner is served. I’ve found that a dash of togarashi on pickled radishes really makes the colour pop, and we all know that pretty food tastes better.

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