Stir-Fried Pork and Peppers Seasoned Only with Oyster Sauce, Learned from Ajibo Group

The ingredients are bamboo shoots, green peppers, pork, garlic, ginger and naganegi (Japanese long onion). Thinly slice 25g of naganegi on the diagonal, and mince 5g each of garlic and ginger. It's fine to keep the garlic and ginger together.

Following Ajibo Group's example, the green peppers are seeded. According to Ryuji, if you don't remove the seeds, you won't get the restaurant's flavor. The seeds soak up extra oil, so leaving them out gives a more authentically Chinese flavor and tastes better, he says. The amount is "120g net." In an exchange with a staff member on set, he explains that net weight means the weight of what you actually use after peeling or seeding. Stack the peppers two at a time and slice them as thinly as possible, since the restaurant staff also cut them very thinly by hand. Ajibo Group also used red peppers, but since they weren't available this time, only green peppers are used.

Because bamboo shoots are hard to julienne by hand, he uses pre-cut boiled bamboo shoot strips, which supermarkets always carry. Drain them in a colander.

The meat is 150g of pork loin cut into thin strips. If you can find slightly thick meat, around the thickness used for ginger pork, that will do, but since it isn't sold very often, he cuts tonkatsu-style loin into strips. Fattier pork shoulder loin is more tender and tasty, but regular loin is fine if that's not available, he says. On the other hand, if the strips are too thick, the texture will feel like eating tonkatsu, so somewhat thin strips are best.

The only seasoning is a pinch of salt, taken between three fingers and rubbed in. Many chinjao rosu recipes have you massage potato starch or egg white into the meat, but none of that is done here. When a staff member asked why, Ryuji answered that the step is meant to tenderize the meat, and it's worth doing if you're using scrap-like meat, but it isn't needed here because good-quality loin is being used.

The first stir-fry uses 3 tablespoons of rice bran oil. Ryuji calls this a "crazy amount." He recommends heating the pan before adding the oil, but adds that it's also fine to heat it after adding it. The heat is medium-high.

There is a reason for the order in which the ingredients go in. The pork goes in first. Thick tonkatsu-style meat takes longer to cook, so it's fine to stir-fry it slowly. According to Ryuji, this is the amount of oil used for stir-frying in Chinese cooking, and coating the ingredients in oil is what makes the dish taste like Chinese food. You can't get the same heat at home as in a restaurant, but you can get the way the food cooks closer, he says.

Next come the bamboo shoots. Ryuji calls bamboo shoots the "core" of chinjao rosu, and says Ajibo Group always oil-blanched them. Bamboo shoots straight out of a vacuum pack have a slight off-odor, and frying them in oil is meant to drive it off.

The green peppers go in last, because they cook the fastest. Stir-fry for about a minute after adding them and stop while they're still crisp. He cautions that at this stage, the one thing to watch is how done the peppers are.

The stir-fried ingredients are turned out into a colander set over a bowl to drain the oil. Ryuji says, "If you don't drain the oil, it won't taste good." This is the home version of oil-blanching, and the meat and peppers keep cooking in the residual heat.

He also touches on how this differs from a restaurant. Chinese restaurants reuse oil that has been used to oil-blanch other ingredients, so it carries the flavors of many different foods. That's why it won't be exactly the same as the restaurant's, but Ryuji's assessment is that it gets pretty close.

Add about 1 tablespoon of rice bran oil to the frying pan and fry the naganegi. Ryuji explains that the naganegi is more of an aromatic than an ingredient. Meanwhile, make a potato starch slurry (2/3 teaspoon potato starch, 2 teaspoons water).

Once the naganegi is slightly browned and starts to crackle, add the garlic and ginger and stir-fry over high heat. When they become fragrant, return the ingredients to the pan, add 5 shakes of pepper and 1 2/3 tablespoons of oyster sauce, and toss everything together. Seasoning with oyster sauce alone is also a method learned from Ajibo Group, he says. Finally, stir the starch slurry well before adding it, coat everything, and it's done.

The staff member who tasted it was surprised, saying it "doesn't taste home-cooked at all," and, eating it with rice, remarked that "you could charge money for this as a chinjao rosu set meal." The thickness of the pork loin and the texture of the bamboo shoots also went over well. Ryuji emphasized once again that how Chinese it tastes depends on the oil. At the same time, they confirmed that it is surprisingly not oily, since the oil was drained once. The staff member was impressed that this much could be done in a home frying pan.

Ryuji positions this as the recipe that draws out the most flavor from the most limited seasonings of all his chinjao rosu recipes. He says he goes through "phases" of cooking obsessions, and he's now in about his "seventh phase," making dishes with pared-down seasonings. He recommends using good-quality oil, specifically rice bran oil, saying it makes the dish light to eat. Because the balance of meat and vegetables is good, it works as a dish on its own, he added, though you could also serve it with wakame soup, Chinese soup or egg soup.

After the tasting, Ryuji revealed that he had forgotten to explain something. The bowl he set under the colander when draining the oil was there so the oil could be used later. This oil is full of flavor from the meat and vegetables, and he had originally intended to use it to fry the pepper seeds that were removed. Since he is working to eliminate food waste, he asked viewers to think of oil as an ingredient too.

However, since that oil couldn't be used during the shoot, sesame oil was substituted. Fry the pepper seeds in sesame oil, then add a pinch of bonito powder (which he says adds a meaty quality), 2 tablespoons of water and a little soy sauce. Partway through, he decided it would taste better with a bit of umami seasoning and added a shake of Ajinomoto. Fried well, the seeds soften too, and once the liquid is gone, you eat them over rice. Ryuji closed the video by urging viewers, "Make sure you eat the seeds, too."