We love eating “special meat” at my house – it’s our name for the teriyaki pork I’ve grown up eating. It’s a simple dish that takes maybe 15 minutes to make, and I bet your family would love it too.
INGREDIENTS
1 Tbsp. oil (canola, sesame, olive oil or vegetable are all fine)
½ cup of onion (I use yellow, but you can use green, white, sweet or red onion)
2 tsp. minced garlic
1 pound of pork meat, slice into ½-inch pieces.
1/3 cup of brown sugar
1/3-1/2 cup of soy sauce
About 1 cup of water (maybe a smidge more, if you want a runnier sauce)
2 Tbsp. cornstarch (optional for a thicker sauce) mixed with ¼ cup of water
DIRECTIONS
- In a skillet, heat up your oil over a medium-high heat. Add onions and garlic. (If you want green onion, save them to garnish your dish at the end.) Cook to let those amazing flavors out. I usually cook this until the onions start to get translucent.
- Add pork meat and let it to start browning. Stir. You don’t need the meat to fully brown. It will cook in your sauce. Trust me.
- Add water, soy sauce and brown sugar. Stir. You can add more soy sauce or water, depending on your tastes. I like my sauce to be a medium-brown color – not a near black like with a straight soy sauce. We like to add red pepper flakes to our dish, too, to give it the contrast of sweet and heat, which is common in Vietnamese dishes. Once your meat is cooked through, give your sauce a taste to see if you want to make any adjustments. Some people may like the saltiness better, so add that extra soy sauce.
- If you want your sauce to be a bit thicker, to more of a gravy-like consistency, you can mix water with cornstarch. Mix and pour it into your saucepan. Stir quickly. If you don’t, it may clump up in the pan. You never want to add cornstarch directly into a hot pan because it’ll clump up.
- Let your pan of meat simmer for a few minutes until it’s cooked through. Serve over a bed of rice.