Tostzilla's Tasty Japanese Miso Pork and Eggplant Rice Bowl Recipe

This recipe for savoury miso pork and eggplant rice bowl is one of many tasty, simple to prepare Japanese rice bowl recipes.  I put up a recipe for Japanese beef bowl (gyudon) previously here.  This recipe, like many of the other rice bowl recipes are basically one pot meals (two if you include the rice cooker), and are great for home cooking with leftovers.  Good otaku nourishment.  

Miso ground pork and eggplant rice bowl.

Most recipes for miso pork and eggplant ask for thinly sliced pork strips, but that is a pile of work you don't need to do.  In Japan, you can buy meat already sliced thin for this kind of cooking, but here, it is usually hard to find or more expensive.  I just usually buy lean ground pork which still has plenty of fat for flavour, but isn't too fatty.  You will need to get a few types of common Japanese / Asian ingredients, but once you get those ingredients you can use them again and again for many different types of recipes. 

All of the ingredients for the miso pork and eggplant except for the ground pork.

You can prepare this meal in 30-45 minutes depending on how speedy you are.  Chopping the vegetables takes half your time.  This makes 4 nice big servings.

Ingredients

• 2 medium size (10 - 12 inches long) Japanese/Chinese eggplants.  Pick eggplants with few wrinkles or brown blemishes (looks like little sunken brown spots).  Sometimes eggplants just look gross as they have been damaged during shipping, frozen, or are too old.
  
• 2 Japanese leeks (negi) or one big western leek.  You can use the white and green parts, but don't use either end.  Wash these carefully as they tend to collect sand inside.
• 1 clove of garlic.  You don't need much or you could skip this.
  
• 1 knob of ginger. Same volume as the your entire thumb.
• 1 lb / 500 grams of lean ground pork.

Sauce Ingredients

• 5 Tablespoons miso paste (use a darker miso like red miso for more flavour). 
  NOTE: if you don't use your miso quickly, put a layer of plastic wrap on the surface.  Miso paste lasts for months in the fridge, but it does dry out.
  
• 2 Teaspoon granulated sugar
• 2 Tablespoons mirin or korean cooking wine (sweet like mirin).
• 2 Tablespoons sake (Any cheap sake)
  
• 2 Tablespoons soy sauce (Kikkoman is fine).
  
• 8 Tablespoons water (100mL) this is a sauce after all.

You should have about 300 - 350 mL of sauce.  Add water to fill it up, if necessary.  I mix everything in a measuring cup.

Preparation Instructions

1. Start cooking your white rice so it is ready when the sauce is. Make plenty of rice if you want to pack some leftovers for lunches.
   
2. Once you have all the ingredients, wash your veggies well.Now chop up your long eggplants into small chunks (not slices), using a Japanese technique called Rangiri.  You basically start a diagonal cut into the eggplant, then keep rotating it 90 degrees to make another cut through to chunk it all up.
3. You can then slice up your leeks, dice your garlic, and ginger (peel the outer skin off the ginger).
   
4. Now mix the sauce up.  Prepare the sauce in a measuring cup so you can easily figure out how much sauce you have.  Makes it easy for pouring too.  Scoop the miso paste out first.  It is sticky stuff, so you will need to scrape it off your scoop.  Use a tablespoon measure for this.  You can then measure in all of the other ingredients by teaspoon or tablespoon.  It will take a bit of stirring to dissolve the miso paste.
   
5. Preheat a cooking pot or large deep skillet to a medium heat with a teaspoon of oil to coat the bottom. You're going to be cooking meat and all the vegetables in it.  I recommend a large pot (12" wide). 
6. When it is up to heat (a drop of water sizzles away). Put in the lean ground pork.  Stir it up well to brown it all so it is thoroughly cooked.  Put in the garlic and ginger at this point too.
7. Put in the eggplant and negi after the meat has browned.
8. Stir it up occasionally so you're mixing everything together and the vegetables have contact with the hot part o the pan to cook up.  You can put the pot lid on too to cook up the top part faster too.
   
9. After 6 -10 minutes of this you can take the lid off and add in the sauce.
10. Let it cook for 10 mins, you can reduce the heat to medium low once it is bubbling, and you are done.
11. Get a ladle and ladle a scoop or two with sauce on top of your steamed rice.  You can now enjoy your steaming hot rice bowl.
    

Cooking the ground pork.

Adding the vegetables to the ground pork.

The pork and veggies cooked long enough to add in the sauce.  Note the eggplants are not all translucent yet from cooking.

The finished product in the pot.  Sauce, pork, and veggies.

I use a rice cooker.  Pretty much all Chinese/Japanese use this.  Too much work and fiddling any other way.

The miso pork and eggplant dished on top of rice.

Tasty spoonful.

This is a great little recipe.  You can use the mirin and sake also for gyudon.  It is tasty with the richness of the miso and a little sweet from the pork, negi, and mirin, and savoury too.  This is a heavier duty recipe, but I'm cooking up dinner for 4 people here.

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