Slow Cooked Pork (in the Rice Cooker)

This is a slight variation of a firm Cook Japan family favourite…buta no kakuni (Japanese braised pork belly).  Mrs Cook Japan is loving our local supermarket’s so called “forgotten cuts”, in this case pork cheeks… 

…so it was still pork, just that it happened to be cheeks and not belly…I have to say if you are a fan of slow cooking pork cheeks are a wonderful cut of meat for this type of dish with a fabulous texture.

So the recipe…Mrs Cook Japan’s secret  is to cook the meat in earl grey tea for 1-1.5 hours until it is really tender, she then changes this to fresh water and adds ginger, garlic,dried lily flowers and daikon (long white Japanese radish) along with soya sauce, mirin, sake and sugar which gives the dish its lovely sweet syrupiness.  The whole thing is put in the rice cooker and left to cook for a couple of hours, after which a few spring onions and leeks go in and everything is left on “keep warm” until its time to eat.

One of the great things about this dish is the way the daikon soaks up the sauce, creating this wonderful marbling effect and making it absolutely delicious…

The finished pork just falls apart on your fork/chopsticks, the tenderness of the meat and flavour is superb and only increases with time (especially if there’s some left for the following day). 

Served on a bed of rice (thankfully we have 2 rice cookers for when it comes to making meals like this), the only drawback was having friends pop round…once they’d had a bowl as well it meant was nothing left for me reheat tomorrow…