A Korean inspired bulgogi marinade transforms simple ingredients into a basic but tasty rice bowl that is meal prep friendly.

Time: 3/5
An hour from start to finish, including cleanup. Still got the whole evening ahead by the time I was done

Effort: 3/5
Could be a two, if you skip the marinating

Big on the Basics

Andong’s ground beef curry opened my eyes to new possibilities. While I have been churning out weeks and weeks’ worth of chicken thighs and rice, I’ve been sleeping on the utility of ground meat for quick and easy meal prep.

It makes a lot of sense. As the protein in mass-produced rice bowls, ground meat comes with a lot of advantages. There’s no trimming or other knife work involved, the small pieces of meat cook quickly, and the large amount of surface area lets the meat take on flavour and seasoning without needing a marinade.

If you want to get super basic, you can get a complete meal by just dumping some ground meat and some salt in a pan, stir it around until it’s not raw anymore, then serve that with whatever vegetables and some rice.

I’m not quite that Spartan yet, though. Part of the fun of home cooking is to put little twists and spins on things. Having read about Korean BBQ lately, I was curious what a bulgogi marinade would do to ground pork, if I used it to make a low-effort rice bowl meal prep. (I also learned that no, bulgogi marinades don’t usually have obscene amounts of Gochujang like I used to think they did.)

It was pretty nice! Basic enough that I could make dinner while still having most of the evening free, but interesting enough to provide some enjoyment. And that’s what I think most home cooking should be – simple, nutritious and straightforward. After all, I cook to live, not for a living. The fancy bougie stuff can wait until a special occasion.

This is just one way to style ground pork, though. You can take a recipe like this down many different roads with short and simple steps. Keep the pork, cook it with lime juice and fish sauce instead for some Thai inspired laab moo. Swap out the pork for beef, use a taco spice mix instead of bulgogi sauce and do a taco beef rice bowl. Or use ground lamb and garam masala to make a quick keema matar.

Change the meat, vary the seasonings, and you’ll get something different enough to excite your palate again. This sort of lateral thinking is what helps me meal prep for 10 years straight without ever running out of new ideas!

If you want to see other ways I use ground pork, go check out my Chinese style steamed meatloaf, my Thai inspired Pad Krapao Moo, or this Pork and Edamame Stir Fry.

Dramatis Personae

Served 7.

Ground pork – 1200g

This can be as lean or as fatty as you like (or as your nutritional goals allow), the tradeoff being that fattier meat will be juicier but more caloric.

You can skip the marinade if you like, but I like to do it because it doesn’t take much time and it means I don’t have to fiddle with plastic packaging on cooking night. It’s often worth it to front-load effort.

If you do marinade the pork, adjust your expectations about browning the meat. There’s sugar and moisture, which means you’re just not going to get much Maillard reaction going and you might burn it if you apply too much heat.

Marinade

Something like 6 tablespoons of light soy sauce, 3 tablespoons of vinegar, 3 teaspoons of sugar, a teaspoon of sesame oil and 2 teaspoons each of ginger paste and garlic paste.

These are just my best guesses. My actual units of measurement are “big splash”, “small splash and a bit more”, “some” and “enough”. And it turned out fine. Go light if in doubt, and know that you can always add more of a seasoning after cooking and tasting. It’s especially important to go easy on the sesame oil, because it can quickly become overpowering.

I know traditional bulgogi marinades often have fruit, like grated pears. Usually the fruit is there for the enzymes to tenderise the meat, but ground meat has already been thoroughly mechanically tenderised. So the vinegar is there to stand in for that fruity acidity. I happened to have sushi vinegar on hand so it’s what I used, but apple cider vinegar or other flavourful vinegars will play very nicely too.

Cabbage – 1800g

Always eat your veggies! Cabbage is a vegetable with one of the highest meal prep effort-to-reward ratios, in my opinion. It doesn’t shrink down a ton after cooking, it’s not hard to break down and it’s relatively easy to wash. I would put it on the same tier as string beans in terms of meal prep friendliness.

I like to season cabbage with some white pepper as well as salt, which is a winning combination I learned while making Yasai Itame. It’s nice to get a hint of that Japanese vibe without needing to go all the way with a dozen different types of vegetables.

Executive summary

1. Get the ground pork into a big mixing bowl. Add marinade and mix until combined. Refrigerate overnight.
2. On the day of cooking, first make rice. Wash and cut vegetables.
3. Cook the cabbage with a skillet or wok in a bit of oil. Season with white pepper and salt to taste, and reserve.
4. In the same pan, cook the pork on medium heat, breaking it up as you stir.
5. Once the pork is cooked, taste and adjust seasoning.
6. Optionally garnish with finely minced spring onions and/or sesame seeds. Assemble, serve and eat.

Play by Play

Last things first. Marinade the pork, but go easy if in doubt. Remember you can always add, but it’s impossible to take seasoning away.

Cook day! Here’s a condensed view of how I break down cabbage. Quartered, cored, and sectioned. Don’t forget to give the vegetables a rinse.

Big skillet, medium heat, all the cabbage. It always seems like too much at first and I have to fight it a bit, but it all works out in the end. With experience, you learn what your equipment can do.

Because there are so few ingredients, I can already guess that this meal will need a bit of colour to brighten it up – pretty food tastes better, and the reverse is also true.

Veggies out, same pan, meat in. Stir until no longer pink. With all the water in the marinade, it’s just not gonna brown. But that’s okay.

Perfect timing! The rice is one minute from being done.

Let’s set the table, in between stirring the pork.

This gray mass of meat looks … kinda sad. Let’s see if I can do something about the colour, by adding a splash of dark soy sauce.

Not really. Now the sad gray meat sits in a brown sauce, instead of a cloudy white sauce. Which is an improvement, I guess. Salt levels are fine, but it tasted better after I added the last several drops of the sushi vinegar.

Just as I thought, the garnish adds a lot.

Tastes better than it looks!

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