The Easiest Japanese Ginger Pork Recipe | 豚のしょうが焼きレシピ | Easy Japanese Cooking

Okay, time for another teriyaki sauce recipe. So far I've only done recipes that kind of have teriyaki in the title but the thing with this sauce is its incredible versatility. It's got really the basic building blocks of a lot of Japanese dishes, mirin, sake, soy sauce and a touch of sugar. So you can use that to really expand your Japanese cuisine repertoire. So the dish I'm going to make today is called buta shogayaki. It kind of translates to ginger pork and it's a very very popular dish. I can't really even count the number of times I've been and eaten this dish when I was living in Tokyo. It's really popular not just as like an office lunch set, even though it is very popular there, but also as a home-cooked dish as well. So here's how you make it. I'm going to start from the end first and then go back to the beginning because we're going to serve this with a real Japanese flavour. Just some finely shredded cabbage. I've got some cabbage, I've got my Japanese mandolin here, the benbuna. Just give that a bit of an adjustment and just shred away. I really want the cabbage to be nice and fine, the sort of the fluffier the better because this is the only vegetable we're going to serve with this. So it's kind of a foil to that nice slightly fatty pork. The reason I'm shredding the cabbage first is because it does benefit from sitting for a little bit but also because I'm a bit lazy and I don't want to wash the board. If I shred the cabbage first then I cut the pork later, I don't need to wash the board in between doing those two tasks. Here we are, a nice pile of shredded cabbage. Remove that, set that aside for the time being. Cut some onions. Now for my ginger, this thing that makes this ginger pork. Peeling ginger is not a difficult thing to do but I see people do it in so many different ways. They get a peeler out or they might use a knife and hack big chunks off it but you don't want to waste your money when you're buying ginger. So the best thing to peel ginger with is a spoon. I just put down a little sheet of kitchen paper, use the spoon just to scrape the skin off the ginger, get into all those little nooks and crannies that a peeler or a knife can't get to. It's a really easy, fast and economical way of doing it because you're not wasting any ginger that's left on the board. Because I put my kitchen paper down the cleanup's very easy as well. So I've got my ginger there and my number one rule for when you're cooking with ginger is don't grate it onto a cutting board. So much of the flavour of the ginger is in the juice itself so always try to grate it into a bowl or something where you can capture all of that juice. A little microplane grater here and I'll just make sure I'm not losing that ginger juice off onto the board. I want a fair bit of ginger here because it is ginger pork after all. Now the secret to these microplane graters is never let anything dry on it because when it dries they can be a real hassle to keep clean because all the dried up stuff can get stuck in these holes here. So as soon as you've used it make sure you take it to the sink, give it a rinse and then you don't have to worry about cleaning out those little holes. So I've got my cabbage, my ginger, my onion here and all that's left is this pork. So for this I want pork that's quite thinly sliced. This is just regular old pork belly, nice quite lean cut. I just want to cut across the grain so you can see the grain of the belly going here. The skin and bones have been taken off so across the grain into say half a centimetre, one centimetre slices. I've kind of got everything ready to go now. I've got my pork sliced, my onion done, ginger grated, the cabbage ready to go for later. So time to head over to the stove. So the normal Japanese way of doing this is to kind of throw everything in together. The pork, the onions, the ginger and the sauce all gets mixed together and it almost stews but I think to get the best flavour out of it it's better to do it in batches. You get a nice browning on the pork before you get all of the liquid going in there. The onions kind of caramelise and then when you bring it all together at the end the flavour just turns up to 100. Pork in first. When the pork's looking lightly browned I'll take that out to a separate tray and it's rendered some of its fat into the oil here as well so it's going to give a really nice flavour to the onions. I've reduced the heat down a little bit at this point as well because I don't want the onions to brown too fast. I want them to bring out a bit of their sweetness while they're caramelising and they look pretty good now. So the pork can go back in as well as the ginger and in with this teriyaki sauce as well. I can put quite a bit of the teriyaki sauce in there because I don't want this to caramelise too much. We've already got the colour on the pork and the onions already so I just want the flavour of that ginger to go through the sauce and be carried around the dish. That looks pretty good so I'll just flick that off, get it onto the plate with a bit of cabbage and a touch of Japanese mayonnaise and we are done. Now you can see why this is such a popular home-cooked dish. Just get it onto the plate, make sure not to lose out on any of these sauces and caramelise its onions as well. And then a big pile of this shredded cabbage to kind of offset the oiliness and sweetness of the pork and it certainly wouldn't be shogayaki without a good whack of mayonnaise. I like to give it just a little sprinkle with this Japanese seven spice but of course you can leave it out if you don't have any. And that is buta shogayaki.