I’ll cut to the chase: it’s not worth the effort to marinade thin cuts of meat. But the marinade makes a great sauce for these meal prep pork bulgogi rice bowls.

Time: 4/5
Man-handling a whole mass of half-frozen pork can get pretty exhausting.

Effort: 4/5
You can get this down to a three if you just use the marinade as a stir fry sauce.

Kaizen

You might be surprised why I posted another recipe for pork bulgogi when I already have recipes for the exact same thing and for ground beef bulgogi. Surely there is enough overlap that the principles of one recipe readily translate to the others?

In fact, these lateral moves are how I keep coming up with new meal prep recipes after 10 years in the game. A honey miso soy glaze can go on salmon or on chicken. Keep the chicken but use a gochujang hot honey marinade and we’re back in business. So on, so forth. 

But demonstrating this pinballing between proteins and seasonings isn’t what this recipe is about. It’s more of a redemption from my mistake of making my first pork bulgogi too gochujang forward. 

After a food-filled trip to Seoul, including a fancy dinner at the two-Michelin starred Kwonsooksoo (for which I wrote an unsponsored review, of course), I got to experience bulgogi first hand. Turns out, it’s a lot closer to Gyudon than I imagined. So, to do the concept of Bulgogi justice, here I am again.

Janky Logic

Besides my atonement for culinary sins, this recipe was also an experiment to see if marinating the meat beforehand would be worth the effort. Because every now and then, it’s worth trying new ways to do things to see if they work better. It’s a version of the exploration/exploitation dilemma, but in the kitchen.

My thinking process went like this:

• Marinating only flavours the outside of meat;
• Thin-cut Shabu Shabu pork has so much surface area that it’s basically all outside; ergo,
• Marinating Shabu Shabu pork should make it all flavour.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t run on Acme cartoon logic. It was a lot of work to marinate, but the end result was not detectably different from if I just simmered the beef in a sauce like I usually do. Perhaps it’s precisely the high surface area to volume ratio of the thinly sliced pork that lets flavours penetrate just fine, even in the brief time it takes to cook.

But that’s fine. I wouldn’t have known that if I didn’t try, and there’s no better teacher than lived experience. So I am still going to document the process and show my mistakes – and even though I wouldn’t recommend this exact method, I still stand by the sauce, and this still ended up as a great meal prep.

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 0

Dramatis Personae

Served 9.

• 1400g thinly sliced Shabu Shabu pork
• 1 large onion
• About 2000g of vegetables: I used cauliflower, napa cabbage, a carrot and some bok choy.
• 2 tbsp oyster sauce
• A few cloves of garlic

Marinade

• 1 tbsp gochujang
• 1 tbsp finely grated ginger
• 1 tbsp finely grated garlic
• 2 tbsp sugar 
• 100ml light soy sauce
• 1 tbsp sesame oil

Executive summary

1. Mix marinade ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.
2. Cut the pork into bite sized pieces, and mix well in marinade. Refrigerate overnight.
3. Begin cooking the next day by making rice and washing the vegetables.
4. Stir fry vegetable with garlic until slightly wilted, then mix in the oyster sauce and reserve.
5. In the same pan, stir fry the marinated pork until slightly pink. Meanwhile, cut the onion into slivers and add to the pan.
6. Add remaining marinade to pork and onions, and stir fry together briefly.
7. Divide up and serve.

Play by Play

I begin with a marinade. Garlic and ginger paste, like the kind you get from an Indian grocer, are great shortcuts to marinades as well as curries.

The pork is still half-frozen, which makes it easy to cut into smaller pieces. It made for a better eating experience, but in retrospect it wasn’t worth the effort for me.

Mix mix mix! To be frank, I eyeballed all the ingredients and was pretty happy with the amount of liquid – just enough to coat everything.

Good night! I’m letting the pork defrost the rest of the way as it marinades. By the way, that huge jar of pickles in the back is what I use for my pickle juice pasta salad.

Here I am the next day, ready to cook. I have some bok choy and Napa cabbage left from a hot pot night that I’m adding to the mix. It’s nice to have some variety.

Always wash your veggies! Check out how much dirt I got off of the cauliflower florets.

The vegetables all go in one big pile. Once they cook down enough to stir, I mix in some oyster sauce and that’s good enough to season them.

The pan is dirty anyway, so I’m sticking with it. In between tossing the pork with a spatula, I cut the onions and got them in the pan as well.

You shouldn’t overcook the pork, but with so much meat it takes a surprisingly long time to make sure nothing is still pink.

Plate up, garnish with some sesame seeds, and there you go! Tastes great, keeps well, but a pity that the marination didn’t add much. Do as I say, not as I do. It was easier to fit the pork on a spoon after going through them with a knife in the beginning though, so make your own value judgment about whether that’s worth your trouble. Masitge Deuseyo!

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