Cold Shabu-Shabu Made with Cheap Pork Offcuts: Ryuji Demonstrates the Prep, the Boiling Method and an Onion Sauce

The ingredients are 250g of pork offcuts, onion and lettuce. A new-season onion was used during filming, but a regular onion is fine. Besides lettuce, other vegetables such as cucumber also work. Heads of lettuce vary in weight; this one was just over 300g, so half was used. The vegetable portion is on the generous side.

Core the lettuce and tear it into small pieces. It's served raw like a salad rather than boiled. According to Ryuji, boiling it is fine too. Boiled, it becomes like a warm vegetable dish and is easier to eat; raw, it keeps its crisp texture. While saying either way is fine, Ryuji went with raw this time because the channel doesn't feature raw vegetables very often.

Here Ryuji also introduced the "50-degree wash." You run bath-temperature water from the water heater and soak the lettuce in it for a few minutes, which makes it crisp. When actually measured, the water was about 43 degrees, but Ryuji said 43 degrees was good enough and left it to soak. It's convenient because it washes the lettuce at the same time.

While the lettuce soaks, make the sauce. Finely mince about 50g of onion. Ryuji explains that adding onion gives the sauce a crisp texture, and because the onion soaks up the sauce, it clings well to the meat. Ryuji prefers cold shabu-shabu dressings that contain vegetables like this. Another point mentioned was that you get to eat the onion too. Ryuji's position is that the sauce is good without it but better with it.

A staff member asked whether a regular, uncooked onion would be pungent. Ryuji's answer was that if you let it sit in a soy sauce and vinegar sauce, the pungency goes away. Ryuji isn't sure whether the pungent compounds break down or whether the salt just masks them, but says a regular onion doesn't end up harsh, so give it a try. You could also soak it in water, but that's an extra step, so it's skipped this time.

The sauce is 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, 1 tablespoon of vinegar (regular grain vinegar is fine), 1 teaspoon of sugar and 5 shakes of Ajinomoto. Explaining why the sugar is kept to a small amount, Ryuji shared a personal view. If you look at things like Showa-era cooking notebooks, traditional Japanese cooking used large amounts of sugar. That was because there were no umami seasonings; since the umami of Ajinomoto also plays the role of sweetness, using it lets you cut down on sugar. Sugar is high in calories, so this also keeps calories down as a result—that is the argument. That's also why Ryuji doesn't use much sugar in their own cooking, and they say that Ajinomoto, which people tend to assume "seems bad for you," can actually lean healthy depending on how it's used.

Add dried red chili to taste for a little heat. If you're making it for kids, you can leave it out. Ryuji, being a drinker, adds it. Finally, add 2 teaspoons of olive oil. Sesame oil would also work, but it pushes the dish too far toward Chinese flavors, and sesame oil is strong enough that everything ends up tasting like "sesame oil." So Ryuji deliberately went with olive oil. When a staff member said cold shabu-shabu and olive oil was an unexpected pairing, Ryuji replied that the olive aroma is delicious and lets you eat it lightly, like a salad. After tasting, Ryuji rated it the ultimate cold shabu-shabu sauce.

What Ryuji stressed as the most important part of this dish is the prep of the meat. If you do shabu-shabu with ordinary pork offcuts, they come out "really, really dry," Ryuji says.

First, add about half a tablespoon of liquid shio koji to the pork offcuts, massage it in, and let it sit. It becomes tender within a few minutes. If you don't have liquid shio koji you can substitute salt, but the liquid version makes the meat more tender, so Ryuji recommends using it.

Next, add 1 teaspoon of potato starch and 1 teaspoon of water and massage them in. Too much starch makes the meat overly jiggly, so keep it to about 1 teaspoon. Because the liquid shio koji also supplies moisture, if you substitute salt, increase the water slightly—about 2 teaspoons for this amount. This makes for tender shabu-shabu, and the longer it sits, the more it takes effect.

Transfer the soaked lettuce to a colander. A salad spinner is ideal, but for those who don't own one, Ryuji showed how to turn the colander upside down and shake it, then blot off the remaining water by gently squeezing the lettuce in paper towels. Leftover water dilutes the dressing, so it's best to remove it thoroughly. Ryuji normally uses a salad spinner and says that if you find this tedious, you should buy one. The lettuce crackled as it was tossed, confirming that the 50-degree wash had made it crisp. Chill the drained lettuce in the refrigerator.

The meat is boiled in stock rather than water. Ryuji says the same method was used in a previous cold shabu-shabu video. When a staff member said they had been using chicken bouillon, Ryuji said that's perfectly fine. This time Chinese-style stock powder is used. Chinese-style stock contains a lot of pork extract, so it's like "cooking pork in pork." Dissolve about 1½ teaspoons of the stock powder in 600cc of water. Cooking the meat in stock seasons it.

The key is to always bring it to a full boil. If it's lukewarm, the pork won't cook through and won't taste good, Ryuji says. If it's only bubbling around the edges of the pot, the center isn't boiling, and adding the meat lowers the temperature further. So get the stock as hot as possible. Once the stock itself is roiling a bit, you can add the meat. You don't need a large amount of water; this quantity is enough.

Don't add the meat all at once—drop it in one slice at a time, spreading each out as much as possible. If you add it in a clump, it sticks together into a mass. Stir while it cooks, and take it out as soon as there's no pink left. It takes less than a minute. Ryuji carefully removes the pieces one by one, but if a few are left behind it doesn't matter, since the liquid becomes soup later.

Scum appeared in the cooking liquid. When a staff member asked whether to skim it, Ryuji said no. Left alone, it blends in, and probably no one could tell the difference. In Ryuji's view, if you skim it, it tastes skimmed, and if you leave it in, it tastes like it's left in—neither is the right answer. Japanese cooking skims it, while Indian cooking doesn't. Ryuji gave the example that you don't skim curry either.

The cooking liquid isn't thrown out but turned into soup. Here Ryuji addressed the staff's feeling that throwing it out would be "a waste of seasoning." Any ingredients are fine, Ryuji says, and adds leftover garlic chives cut into 4cm lengths. Rough cutting is fine. Ryuji says that restaurant food, served to customers who pay for it, has to look good as well as taste good, but home cooking doesn't.

Saying pork and garlic chives go well together, Ryuji seasons it with about 2 teaspoons of soy sauce and, declaring this the thing for Chinese-style soup, adds about 4 shakes of table pepper. The pork flavor comes through strongly and it's delicious; you can add egg if you like. This soup uses no oil and relies on the flavor of the pork alone.

Just as they were about to plate, Ryuji noticed a mistake. The boiled meat had been left piled up in the tray, so it hadn't cooled sufficiently. Ryuji admitted this was from rushing and explained again that the meat should be spread evenly in the tray. It will cool given time, but meat coated in starch tends to cool slowly, so spreading it out is important.

Ryuji recommended using a metal tray. Plastic doesn't cool at all. When Ryuji asked the staff why, the answer was "thermal conductivity," and Ryuji went on to say that "cooking is half science." When asked what the other half was, a staff member answered "love," and Ryuji at first retorted, "Love doesn't make food taste better." But Ryuji immediately added that love shows up in cooking in the form of effort, so in that sense it's true. Ryuji then summed it up: half of cooking is science, and the other half involves things like effort and the quality of the ingredients. When you have time, the refrigerator is fine, but when you're in a hurry, it's best to put the whole tray in the freezer.

First, ladle the garlic chive soup into bowls. It makes about three servings, or two generous ones. Since you're getting protein from the shabu-shabu, Ryuji said a simple soup with just garlic chives is fine.

When Ryuji touched the cooled meat, it wasn't dry but moist. Ryuji called it "super tender" and said that at this point it was certain you can make cold shabu-shabu even with cheap pork offcuts. The meat is piled on the lettuce, and all of the sauce made at the start is poured over it. Scatter scallions and garnish with shredded chili threads.

Seeing the chili threads, a staff member assumed they'd be spicy, but Ryuji explained they're not. They're Korean chili, so they aren't spicy to begin with and have sweetness and umami. There was also a moment where the staff member tasted them to check.

Ryuji was confident everyone would be surprised when they tasted it. To a staff member who had only ever eaten cold shabu-shabu with ponzu, Ryuji explained that this sauce is in nearly the same flavor direction as ponzu. It also goes well with rice and is delicious on somen noodles, Ryuji says.

A staff member asked whether it lacked the richness of pork belly. Ryuji replied that the soy sauce and vinegar onion dressing coats everything, so it's plenty tasty and goes great with drinks. The staff's impressions were "It's tender" and "I thought it would be more dry and crumbly." Ryuji explained that this time liquid shio koji and potato starch were used together; starch alone makes it quite tender, but adding shio koji makes it even more tender. Simply cooking it in Chinese-style stock without this prep wouldn't produce this result, Ryuji says. A staff member who normally uses loin also said it was no different from loin. The dressing had no onion pungency, just a slight freshness at the finish.

Someone also commented that it seemed good for dinner on days when you want to lose weight. Ryuji said that with pork belly it's fatty and high in calories, but with pork offcuts it holds up well even compared to regular shabu-shabu. Noting that it uses almost no sugar, has a crisp soy sauce and umami flavor, and the only fat is a little olive oil, Ryuji also said you could lose weight on it. A staff member who likes to eat the same thing every day said it has a good balance of protein and vegetables and the flavor isn't overpowering, so they'd want to eat it the next day too, and Ryuji agreed it might suit them.

As for the garlic chive soup, the staff said it was hard to believe it was made from leftover cooking liquid. It has a simple flavor with no oil added, and Ryuji added that throwing in leftover vegetables or mushrooms would make it even better nutritionally.

Ryuji closed the video by saying that the idea of making cold shabu-shabu with pork offcuts might not occur to many people, but even with cheap pork offcuts it turns out really delicious, so give it a try.