Miso flavored ground pork donburi 豚肉味噌丼

I frequently purchase pork tenderloin. Although I sometimes make "Tonkatsu" トンカツor "Hirekatsu" ヒレカツ from it, my most common way of cooking it is to rub it with a combination spices (the combination changes frequently but the most common ones are either chopped fresh rosemary with salt and pepper or a mixture of smoked Spanish paprika, cumin, cinnamon, black pepper, and salt). I then bake it in a low-temperature oven (350F convection oven for 30 minutes) or grill it on the Weber grill. When I prep the tenderloin, I usually cut off the head and tail portions so that the rest of the tenderloin will be a uniform size and cook evenly.  I use these trimmings for many dishes but I most often hand chop them into ground pork. This is one of the dishes I made using pork tenderloin trimmings.



This is a variation of meat "soboro" 肉そぼろ. I posted one with chicken and soy sauce flavor. This one is pork with miso flavor for a change. I used this one night as a topping for cubes of warm tofu or 肉味噌豆腐 and from the leftovers, I made this donburi dish 肉味噌丼.



I just placed a runny yolk poached egg ( I used Pasteurized shell eggs) in the center of the bowl with warm cooked rice in it and then surrounded the egg with miso-flavored ground pork. I garnished it with chopped chives.

Ingredients:
Ground pork (Probably about half pound), miso (4 tbs), sugar (1 tbs) mirin (3 tbs) and sake (2 tbs), scallion (finely chopped, 4 stalks), ginger (finely chopped to taste) and Japanese single flavored red pepper flakes (to taste) .

The ratio of the meat to the sauce is rather arbitrary and depends of how you are going to use it. For a donburi dish, you may want to have a larger quantity and thinner sauce. For topping, you may want the sauce to be a bit drier. The amount of sweetness is also up to your taste.

I first cooked the ground pork in a frying pan with a small amount of vegetable oil (or sesame oil if you so prefer). Once the color changed, I took it off the heat and set aside.

In the same frying pan, I added more vegetable oil and sautéed the chopped ginger until fragrant (you can also add garlic here). I mixed the miso, sugar, mirin and sake in a small bowl and poured it into the frying pan. When the sauce heated up, I added the red pepper flakes and the meat. I constantly stirred on medium heat until the sauce thickened to my liking. I let it cool and kept it in a sealed container in the refrigerator for later use.

For this dish, I took the miso flavored ground pork which I made several days ago out of the refrigerator. I heated it up in a small sauce pan. The sauce was not enough and too thick for this dish so I added a mixture of miso, mirin and sake to make more sauce.

My wife is not particularly fond of the flavor of miso, red pepper and ground pork for some reason. The sauce was not too hot but she added a small mount of yogurt to hers. The combination of freshly cooked rice with salty, nutty, sweet miso flavor which were mixed with egg yolk is pretty good, at least, for me. We had this one as a "shime" 〆 or ending dish of the evening and was quite satisfying.