So, I’ve never cooked much in the way of Japanese food. Well, aside from things like temakisushi and instant ramen, that is. Last weekend we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Gochi, with K & N, and had a dish called ‘Buta no Kakuni,’ which is basically braised pork belly. We’d had it before, both at Gochi, and at Sushi Sam’s, and at both places, it’s absolutely glorious. The pork is melt-in-your-mouth tender, bursts with flavor, and even though an order of the stuff basically gets you four bites, it’s totally worth it.

So, I thought, ‘I can make this.’ The only thing really standing in the way is time, and right now, I’ve got a lot of it. So, I looked around the giant truck that is the internet, and found a handful of different recipes. There seem to basically be three major ways of tackling the dish – one is a quick stir-fry then a long braise, one is just a long braise, and the last, which was the most complicated, required steaming the pork for 2.5 hours in a bed of grated daikon, then a simmer for half an hour in a sake, soy sauce, mirin, sugar, water, and ginger mixture.

I figured I might as well try the most convoluted one first, so that’s the one I did. No, I didn’t take pictures (though I should have). There are a lot of variables. Mostly, the sake/soy sauce/mirin/sugar/water ratios, but beyond that, the type of sake and mirin you use can have a radical effect on the sweetness of the dish. Since you braise the stuff for so long, the flavor profile changes quite a bit, so it’s hard to tell what the final product will taste like simply by tasting the mixture at the start.

The result tonight, following the recipe’s timing, left pork that wasn’t as tender as I would have liked. Fortunately (for the dish), Ei-Nyung was a little late home tonight, so it got an extra 45 minutes to simmer, and texture-wise, that mostly did the trick. Another 45 minutes and it would have been awesome. The smaller pieces (this particular piece of pork belly had pretty irregular thickness) were perfect, but the larger pieces weren’t as tender as they should have been. Flavor-wise, I was reasonably happy with it. Ei-Nyung thought it a little too sweet, and I think she’s probably right, though the level of sweetness was acceptable to me.

Tomorrow, I’m going to try it again – Ei-Nyung’s out to dinner with some friends, so I’m gonna try one of the stir-fry->simmer recipes, with a slightly different ratio of the various simmering ingredients.

In tonight’s dinner, I also threw in some parsnips, carrots and blocks of daikon, which simmered in the sauce for about 35 minutes or so. I could probably have just made a dinner of the veggies, to be perfectly honest.

Good stuff, but could be better. I’ll take pictures tomorrow.