Japanese Pulled Pork Fried Rice

Fried rice used to be my Achilles tendon. The pan was never hot enough, the flavors never intense enough to make it worthy of a recipe. I think I'm there now. With lashings of mirin and rice wine vinegar, ginger, soy, garlic, this has got a cleaner palette than your store bought fried rice. Add the lotus root and you've got a texture party. I've heard that old rice is best for fried rice. But I've tried something new. Brown rice. Nutty, firm, delicious. Hard to cock it up with brown rice.

Ingredients

500g Brown Rice

4 Eggs

1/4 white cabbage, diced.

800g Pork Shoulder Chunks

2 Red Capsicums, diced

3 Medium carrots, peeled and diced quite small

3 Onions, peeled and diced

1/4 cup Lemon Juice

7 Cloves of Garlic, peeled and minced

4 Teaspoons of Grated Ginger

Dark Soy Sauce

1/2 Cup of Mirin

1/4 Cup of Rice Wine Vinegar

Salt

Pepper

Peanut oil

Sesame oil

Method

Super simple if you've made fried rice before. I figure that fried rice is all about good rice and prep of ingredients.

Start with the longest first. Obviously, this is the pulled pork! I used a pressure cooker. The process is generally the same, one just takes a bit longer.

Take the pork shoulder chunks, and fry them off in the pot or pressure cooker with a lug of peanut and a drizzle of sesame oil until lightly browned. Add half of the mirin, all of the ginger then top up with water. In a pot cook on medium with a lid for 3-3.5 hours until tender and then reduce the sauce until it's frying again. If it's in the pressure cooker, 40 mins in the pressure cooker should be more than enough. Reduce until frying. Pull apart the meat with a fork into chunks.

In a rice cooker, cook the brown rice as per instructions. The brown rice is tougher and maintains its shape. This works well for fried rice.

In a frying pan on a high heat, toss in the onions and ginger with a big lug of peanut oil. Fry until translucent and browning.

Carrots. Blanch the carrots in boiling water until the water is cool enough to touch. Drain.

Next in peanut oil, fry your lotus root until brown on each side.

Mix the cabbage with the carrots, onions, lotus root and capsicum.

Now batch cook the fried rice. The process is a drizzle of peanut oil in a frying pan and then add about a cup of vegetables and half a cup of the pork. Fry on a high heat and pepper well. Add the rice and fry.

Keep it moving around so it doesn't stick. Add three tablespoons of soy to the fried rice and unload to a serving bowl.

Repeat the process until you've used up all the ingredients. Remember to keep the heat high and move through it all quickly!

After the last batch, oil the pan once more and crack in eggs and fry/beat them in the pan until hard. Shred, and then toss through the rice.

Drizzle with a little more soy sauce, grind a bit more pepper into it.

Serve with Kewpie!

Enjoy!