One of the delicious combinations of food I enjoy is pork, eggplant, shiso leaves, and ginger-based sweet soy sauce. Today’s recipe – Ginger Pork Rolls with Eggplant (茄子の肉巻き生姜焼き) is in every way the marriage of all these ingredients. As a result, you get a homey and tasty dish that goes amazingly with rice.
Quick Weeknight Meal with Ginger Pork Rolls with Eggplant
This pork roll recipe is very simple and easy to make, and I especially love that it is super bento-friendly. The kids get vegetables and meat together, and with a delicious savory sauce that even at room temperature, the pork rolls are still delicious by lunchtime. You will be surprised by how fast it can be put together and the complexity of the flavors it offers!
Thinly Sliced Meat in Japanese Cooking
Many of you have asked me what Japanese people eat at home that we don’t eat at restaurants. Well, pork or beef rolls like today’s recipe is definitely one of the examples of food we eat at home. An honest-to-goodness kind of food that our grandmothers and mothers cook for the family. Japanese don’t typically consume a lot of meat, so it’s not common to cook a whole chicken or a big block of pork or beef. Instead, we eat a whole range of foods, rice or noodles for carbs, plenty of vegetables and soy-based foods like tofu, seafood and a small amount of meat in a meal.
When you go to Japanese markets, you will see pre-sliced pork and beef that are as thin as paper. We call this cut of meat “Usugiri Niku“(薄切り肉), thinly cut meat. These thinly sliced meats can be from different parts of the meat. For example at the Japanese grocery store I visit, they carry pork belly slices, super thin pork loin slices (for Shabu Shabu), and semi-thin pork loin slices (for Sukiyaki). Same goes with the beef cut. In Japan, there are more categories for thinly sliced meat.
If you can’t find thinly sliced meat locally, here’s the tutorial on How to Slice Meat Thinly (with video).
On Just One Cookbook, you’ll find different meat roll recipes using thinly sliced pork/beef:
Teriyaki Steak Rolls Potato Salad Pork Rolls Mashed Potato Teriyaki Pork Rolls Baby Carrot Beef Rolls
2 Unique Japanese Ingredients Used in this Dish + Substitutes
1) Shiso leaves (sometimes called Ooba)
Shiso (perilla leaves) is my favorite Japanese herb that I often use to add extra zing and to elevate the presentation of a dish. It is an optional ingredient, but it’s worth getting if you live near a Japanese grocery store or lucky enough to have access from your farmers market. This herb is also super easy to grow with low maintenance, and many Just One Cookbook readers have started growing their own shiso plants from seeds (you can purchase from Kitazawa Seed online). You can also substitute with mint and Thai basil, but they don’t taste similar to shiso. So enjoy it as a variation of this dish!
2) Yuzu Kosho (yuzu pepper paste)
Came from Kyushu area, yuzu kosho is a little spicy but packed with umami flavor. It’s made of red chili pepper fermented with salt and yuzu zest and has the ability to enrich any bland dish. Just a tiny dab of yuzu kosho goes a long way. And when you make this Ginger Pork Rolls with Eggplant for your family, do cook up more rice as everyone will be going for seconds! It’s everything we all love about home cooked food.
Japanese Ingredient Substitution: If you want to look for substitutes for Japanese condiments and ingredients, click here. Wish to learn more about Japanese cooking? Sign up for our free newsletter to receive cooking tips & recipe updates! And stay in touch with me on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram. Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on February 21, 2011. New images and step by step images have been added to the post in May 2019.
