Thinly sliced pork in a savoury gochujang-based sauce makes for a wonderful meal with rice.

Time: 2/5
A lot of lunches in an hour, and relatively easy clean up

Effort: 2/5
No marinading, minimal prep, throw stuff into a wok and call it a day

Mix-and-match Magic

I’ve been loving those packs of thinly sliced meat that grocery stores sell from their freezers. They’re sometimes marked as being for hot pot or shabu shabu, but in fact I find that they’re a real godsend for quick and easy meals.

The key quality that makes them so useful is their thinness. They’re quick to cook because heat can conduct quickly across a short distance to the center of each slice, and the large surface area to volume ratio obviates the need to marinade – the seasoning on the outside is quickly distributed into the negligible amount of inside as you chew. (I never imagined I’d be using geometry and physics in the kitchen, but here I am. Stay in school, kids)

That’s why they form a core component of a rice bowl formula that I’ve discovered as I explored Japanese and Korean cooking:

Thin meat + sauce + onions = quick and delicious pairing with rice and veggies.

Pork and onions with a dashi-mirin-soy sauce? Butadon.
Same sauce but with thinly sliced beer instead? Gyudon.
Swap the sauce out for a Gochujang-soy-honey blend instead? Beef bulgogi.

Since I have some gochujang-based Korean-inspired sauce left over from my Korean Fried Chicken experiment, I decided make good use of it to create another member of this rice bowl family. I also happened to have some kimchi’d perilla leaves I made last year (gasp – still good!) and soft boiled eggs hanging around in the fridge, which made for great upgrades to the presentation and taste.

While I make no claims about authenticity (for example, I’ve since learned that true bulgogi doesn’t involve the obscene amounts of gochujang I used – which led to this minimalist Bulgogi ground pork rice bowl), I am most definitely making claims about efficiency and a great effort-to-reward ratio.

Dramatis Personae

Thinly sliced pork 100-200g pax

Pork shoulder was what I used, but pork belly would be a more decadent choice. The whole recipe would work just as well with beef. It does pay to put some care into separating the pieces somewhat as you put them into the pan, because they can be hard to separate without breaking the pieces apart in the pan.

I’ve read elsewhere that you could put meat in the freezer for half an hour or so and make thin slices by hand yourself, but in my opinion you might as well cut the meat into large chunks and make a stew or something instead. That’s much too effort for its worth and kind of defeats the purpose of using thin slices in the first place.

Aromatics

Onions are pretty important to these styles of rice bowls, in my opinion. They provide a lot of sweetness, and the liquid they release as they cook form a component of the sauce. Let them cook long enough to develop some caramelisation and colour. Cut them pole-to-pole, as opposed to along their equator, so they hold their shape better.

Garlic makes everything better. Ginger might be nice too, but it was too much effort to peel after a long workday. You know how it be sometimes.

Sauce

Essentially, a mix of gochujang with soy sauce, sugar, garlic and sesame oil. This was left over from my Korean fried chicken, but it isn’t much effort to create it right in the pan together with the pork. I felt the sauce needed to be more salty-umami than it was sweet for this particular application, so I did end up making a small addition of fish sauce to shift its balance.

Vegetables 200g pax

Always eat your veggies! The shops nearby often hold sales to get rid of their remaining produce at the end of the day. Today’s vegetables are a hodgepodge of whatever looked good while passing by on the way home from work, stir fried together with some soy sauce.

Garnish

Making food look nice enhances the eating experience considerably. It’s one of those things that make restaurant food better than home cooking. A sprinkle of sesame seeds and a scatter of finely chopped scallions at the end goes a long way to making dinner feel much fancier than its pay grade.

Eggs and kimchi are, of course, thematically appropriate and wonderful additions. The egg yolks, in particular, add vibrant pops of colour that wake up a dish that can otherwise look dull and homogenous.

I happened to have some perilla leaves left from an earlier culinary adventure that I covered in fish sauce, honey and dried chilli flakes that kept surprisingly well after several months in the fridge, which served as a peppery and briny contrast for the sweet, sticky pork.

Executive summary

1. Get rice cooking. The rice can sit there and wait while the other components come together.
2. Wash and prepare the vegetables and garlic.
3. Stir fry the vegetables and set aside.
4. Stir fry onions until lightly browned. Add pork and garlic.
5. Add sauce when pork is halfway done. Stir to combine.

Play by play

Picked up some baby cabbage and snow peas. Some of that big pile of garlic is for the pork (although I certainly wouldn’t have any objection to extra-garlicky vegetables). Note the box of ‘KFC’ sauce lurking in the shadows.

Snow peas benefit from a head start. to let their pods soften up a bit. If you have the stovetop space and the willingness to wash another pan, this can happen in parallel to the pork.

Baby cabbage joins the party together with some soy sauce. The sodium in the soy will draw moisture out from the vegetables. Once that happens, you don’t need to worry about stuff burning on the bottom anymore, and you can safely go multitask elsewhere. You could also cover and let it steam at this point.

Onions cut pole to pole, to help them retain their shape.

Let the onions get some colour. We’re not trying to make caramelised onions here, but the longer they go the softer and sweeter they become. While this is happening, I’m opening up the packs of sliced pork.

Pork in. Separate the slices, but don’t try too hard. They’ll come out fine even if they clump up a bit, it’s mainly an issue of aesthetics.

Don’t wait too long to add the sauce, because the pieces of pork are pretty thin and will overcook quickly. I had sauce ready on hand, but sauce could be made in the pan de novo simply by dumping the sauce ingredients in. Either way, it’d take some stirring before the bulgogi pork is done.

Stir to combine. The residual heat should be enough to cook the pork the rest of the way. If it still looks a little undercooked, portion out the meals that you’d reheat later (they’ll cook more in the microwave) and let the pork you’ll be eating immediately go a bit longer

Mashitke deu seyo ~

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