Cook’s notes
Traditionally, the way to cook a teriyaki dish is to marinate the meat in the sauce before cooking. The marinated meat is either grilled and basted repeatedly with the marinade, or braised in the sauce.
The second method is used in cooking this skewered pork dish but without marinating the meat at all. When meat is cut this thinly, it easily soaks up the sauce during cooking. Marinating is really superfluous.
What is bacon-cut pork belly?
It’s pork belly sliced as thin as bacon rashers. Machine-sliced, to be accurate. It’s really difficult to do this by hand. If “bacon-cut pork belly” is not a term used in your neighborhood meat shop, try asking for Korean pork samgyeopsal or Korean pork bulgogi. We usually buy bacon-cut pork belly for stir fries but I had this idea of rolling each slice, threading the rolled meat with bamboo skewers and cooking the skewered rolled meat with teriyaki sauce in a pan on the stovetop. No grilling. Not on a day when the temperature soared to levels that we dared not set up the grill outdoors.How many rolled pork per skewer depends on the length of the skewer. For best results, choose a skewer length that will fit in your frying pan.
How do you make teriyaki sauce?
Teriyaki sauce is equal amounts of Japanese soy sauce, sake and mirin. I must emphasize that it’s Japanese soy sauce. Not Chinese soy sauce which is generally darker and saltier. Not Indonesian soy sauce — or kecap manis — which is sweet. Sake and mirin are rice wines. Sweetish. Sake has a higher alcohol content than mirin. Note that there’s sake for cooking and sake for drinking. While you may use either, cooking sake is a lot cheaper. Mirin is syrupy which gives the surface of the cooked dish a glazed texture. You need both to make teriyaki sauce. Just mix them together with the Japanese soy sauce.Skewered pork belly teriyaki
Ingredients
- 500 grams bacon-cut pork belly (1.1 pounds)
- cooking oil
Teriyaki sauce
- ¼ cup Japanese soy sauce
- ¼ cup cooking sake
- ¼ cup mirin
Instructions
- Press the pork slices between stacks of paper towels to remove surface moisture.
- Roll up each slice into a log.
- Thread the rolled pork belly with bamboo skewers.
- Brush or spray a frying pan with oil and heat.
- Lay the skewered pork in the oil in a single layer and sear on all sides until lightly browned.
- Mix all the ingredients for the teriyaki sauce and pour in.
- Bring the sauce to a boil, set the heat to low, cover the pan and braise the skewered pork, turning them over every few minutes, until most of the sauce has been soaked up.
- Continue cooking the pork in the rendered fat, turning them over often, until the sauce caramelizes and forms a glaze on the surface of the meat.
Pork belly kaldereta