I love reading up on food, it’s been a bad habit of mine ever since I was a kid. I’d dig out books on food in the library and spend my lunch breaks sitting and reading cook books or food in general. Why? It’s because I’m a glutton. I don’t know what I was in my previous life but I won’t be surprised if I often was hungry or just pure greedy back then.
One of my recent reads include this food manga called Oishinbo. It spans through several volumes and each volume would cover different topics, such as “Raw Fish, Sashimi” , “Vegetables”, “Rice”, “Izakaya” and so on so forth. In one of the volumes, I came across this dish where they fried breaded oysters and put it on top of kimchi and rice. It sounded strange but drool worthy enough. I love kimchi and love fried oysters or anything fried.
The thing that I didn’t really like was that I had to fry something if I were to try out this recipe. I’ve got this thing about using large quantities of oil, spluttering hot oil and stinking up my kitchen as well as my living room while frying. So I rarely deep-fry if I can help it. I only extend enough effort to fry simple things like eggs and vegetables but rarely anything else. So my frying skills are worse than my other cooking skills which are bad enough as it is already.
But the thought of fried meat and kimchi was just too alluring….
Ingredients (3-4 pax)
- 750 gram of fatty meat (pork belly, fat cuts of pork meant for sweet and sour pork etc)
- Panko Breadcrumbs (enough to coat the fatty meat in)
- Plain flour (to coat the fatty meat)
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- A heaping tablespoon per person of Japanese Mayo
- Kimchi
- 3 tbsp chopped spring onions
- Cooking oil
Cooking Instructions
- Cut the meat into 1 inch chunks and marinate with the soy sauce. Set aside
- Spread the panko onto a plate so it’s easier to coat the meat later. Do the same with the flour on another plate.
- Coat each piece of meat with flour and shake off the excess before dunking it in the beaten eggs and lastly rolling it in breadcrumbs.
- Heat up the oil and place the breaded meat in the pan, making sure that you don’t overcrowd the pan. I suppose you should deep fry it but I couldn’t bring myself to so I pan fried it instead.
- When the meat turns golden brown on each side, remove from the pan and onto a small wire rack that will hold the meat. This is to drain out the oil. You could also put the fried meat onto some kitchen towel but it will cause the crunchy panko layer to become soggy faster.
- Ladle rice into the bowls and add however much kimchi you like. Then top with your fried meat, mayo and lastly the spring onions.
