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     Title: About Butaniku No Shogayaki (Japanese Ginger Pork)
Categories: Japanese, Pork, Info
  Servings: 1

           pork
           ginger

Pork ginger doesn't have to be made with thinly sliced meat. It just
happens to be superior when made with tougher cuts of pork, like
shoulder and belly, both of which have a nice mix of fat, muscle,
and tough connective tissue that can give shoulder and belly the
illusion of juiciness and tenderness even when thoroughly cooked.
But that connective tissue can also make them tough unless you buy
the cuts in very thin slices, which breaks up the connective tissue
and ensures it'll become delicious and easy to eat after only a
brief stint in a hot pan.

When thinly sliced shoulder or belly are unavailable I've used
leaner pork tenderloin or loin, cut into slivers. The result is
still very tasty, but it lacks the sort of textural complexity
inherent in a cross section of shoulder or belly, with a nice band
of fat that's alternately chewy and meltingly ephemeral, a fair
amount of tender meat, and a bit of tougher, collagen-rich
connective tissue that can run the gamut from toothsome to
gelatinously soft.

The proportions of ingredients in the marinade are dictated
primarily by taste. I haven't changed the proportions all that much
over the years, but I have decided that adding grated garlic to the
marinade is unnecessary (even if it is quite tasty), and I've found
I prefer to have julienned bits of ginger, softened slightly by a
little heat, in the final mix; scallions I've added as a completely
unnecessary yet welcome bit of greenery (and oniony flavor).

Some recipes for pork ginger call for marinating the meat, cooking
it, and then constructing a sauce after the fact; I think this is a
wonderful idea, but part of the reason I like making pork ginger the
way my mother made it is it's a quick two-step process, even if the
alternative is an almost equally quick three-step process.

While different cuts might require slightly different cooking times,
lean tenderloin cooks very quickly and is a little more
uninteresting unless you brown it deeply, whereas the tougher,
thicker belly needs to fry for longer to cook through and become
reasonably tender,they all produce eminently edible sweet-salty meat
dishes perfect for eating with rice. The fattier cuts produce more
"sauce" (really just the exuded juices mixed with the marinade and
any rendered fat), whereas the leaner cuts produced a dryer
stir-fry.

Even in the world of thinly sliced meats, there are differences.
Cuts intended for yakiniku are usually around 1/8-inch (3mm) thick,
whereas shabu shabu cuts are even thiner at about 1mm; sukiyaki
often falls somewhere in the middle. In my tests, the more thinly
sliced meats (about 1mm thick), produced more scraggly bits of
cooked meat than thicker slices of the same meats. The version I
preferred was made with roughly 1/8-inch-thick (3mm) sliced pork
shoulder, solely because of the tougher bands of chewy and salty
fat, whereas the tasters of some of these trials appeared to prefer
a similar thickness of pork loin slices. All of which is to say,
while I recommend seeking out and using thinly sliced pork shoulder,
you can really use any of the cuts above. (You can, yes, prepare
beef or chicken in a similar way; it won't be the same, but it'll
work out all right.)

As with any stir-fry, the main technique consideration is avoiding
overcrowding your pan, whether you're using a wok or a skillet. You
aren't going for wok hei (or torch hei) here; you aren't even going
for a substantial sear. You just want to get a little browning on
the pork and a little caramelization of the sugars in the marinade.
You don't want the pork to just steam. However, having made this
countless times, if the pan isn't hot enough, or the pork
unaccountably seems to dump a ton of water in the pan upon contact
and you get very little browning and very little caramelization,
it's still tasty. The same can be said about using very high-quality
pork or commodity pork; it will taste good either way, although one
will be noticeably superior.

I tend to eat pork ginger with just white rice and pickles, but you
can use it as an element of a more composed rice bowl, swapping out,
say, the chicken or beef in simple recipes for donburi. However, I
want to make a brief case for definitely serving it with kizami
shoga, the pickled, julienned ginger that's colored an unnaturally
bright red. The best part of kizami shoga, aside from its inherent
gingery-ness and acidity, is that it's quite salty, and while it may
seem odd to highly recommend a very salty condiment/pickle type
thing to put atop an already quite salty meat-type thing, when you
eat the combination with a ton of white rice it'll all make
delicious sense.

Sho Spaeth in Serious Eats
 
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