Vietnamese Caramelized Pork

As a lover of pork, I’m always game for a new pork dish. As I was preparing to make fried rice with some ground pork in the fridge, I thought about a possible alternative. I found it with this Vietnamese caramelized pork recipe. It was delicious.

The recipe resides here, along with several other great Asian recipes.

This time I followed the recipe exactly, but I can see opportunity to make some useful tweaks to alter the flavor profile. Making this, including prep and cooking should take less than 20 minutes.

So without further delay….

What you’ll need:

• 1-2T cooking oil, but not olive
• ½ (½ cup) finely-diced onion
• 2t freshly-grated ginger
• 2 large garlic cloves, lightly smashed
• 1 Thai chili, deseeded and finely chopped
• 1 lb ground pork (coarse-ground is what I happened to have)
• 5T brown sugar (or light brown)
• 2T fish sauce
• 1 green onion stem, finely sliced (optional garnish)

What to do:

Heat the oil in a large skillet over high heat.

Add the onion, ginger, garlic and chili and cook until fragrant and the onion has slightly softened. Make sure not to let the garlic scorch—it will ruin the dish.

Add the ground pork and cook for a few minutes until its browned, breaking up the meat with a cooking spoon.

Add the sugar and fish sauce. Stir, to coat the meat, then let cook without stirring until all the juices cook off and the pork starts to become caramelized. This takes a few minutes. Then stir the meat and let it sit again, without stirring, so it can further caramelize—about 1 minute. Repeat until all the meat is caramelized to your liking.

Serve over rice in a bowl for a super-easy and delicious meal.