Pork Kakuni: The Dish That Made Me Like Pork

I did not like pork as a kid.

Not in a picky way, in a settled way. I had decided pork was dry, tough and vaguely grey, and I had a lot of evidence.

The Evidence Was Thin Pork Chops

My mom made pork chops. Cut thin, and cooked until they were rubber.

For years I filed that under my mom's cooking. It is not fair, and it took me a long time to work out why.

Until 2011, the USDA told Americans to cook pork to an internal temperature of 160°F. That recommendation existed because of trichinosis, a parasite pigs could pick up from what they ate and rooted around in, and 160 was the number that made it a non-issue.

The trouble is that 160°F applied to a thin chop is a guarantee of a dry one. There is not enough mass in it to survive the trip. A whole generation of American home cooks followed the instructions correctly and produced rubber, because the instructions were written to kill a parasite, not to make dinner good.

In 2011 the USDA lowered it to 145°F with a three-minute rest, which is now considered just as safe. The reason it could be lowered is that trichinella has essentially disappeared from American pork, thanks to indoor farming and modern biosecurity.

So my mom was following the rules. The rules were the problem. I owe her an apology and this paragraph is it.

The One Exception

The only way I liked pork as a kid was katsu. Breaded, fried, sauced.

That is its own post and I will write it, because the sauce we use is on our menu for a specific reason. For now it is enough to say that katsu was the exception that proved the rule: I liked pork when it was hidden under something.

Then I Had Kakuni

Kakuni is what changed it, and it changed it completely.

The name is plain. Kaku means square or cube. Ni means simmered. Cubes of pork belly, simmered.

What that description leaves out is the time. Pork belly is a hard-working cut, full of collagen and layered with fat, and if you cook it fast it fights you. Simmer it slowly and for long enough and the collagen breaks down into gelatin, which is the point of the whole exercise. The fat renders, the meat goes soft enough to give way to chopsticks, and the texture stops being meat-like at all in the best possible way.

It is the exact opposite problem to the pork chop. A chop has no margin and punishes you for a minute too long. Kakuni has enormous margin and punishes you for stopping early.

This was the first pork I had eaten where the fat was the reason to eat it rather than something to trim off.

It Started With a Chinese Poet

The ancestor of kakuni is dongpo rou, and the story attached to it is worth telling.

Su Shi, better known as Su Dongpo, was a poet and official of the Northern Song dynasty. He oversaw successful flood-control work at West Lake in Hangzhou, and the people there thanked him with gifts of pork and Shaoxing wine. He cooked the pork and served it back to them. They liked it enough to name it after him.

The dish reached Japan through Nagasaki, which for most of the Edo period was the only port open to foreign trade. Chinese cooking arrived there and became part of shippoku, Nagasaki's own hybrid banquet cuisine, where the dish is called touba-ni, the Japanese reading of the same name. That is generally cited as the origin of Japanese buta no kakuni.

Nagasaki's version leaned heavily on sugar, which was expensive and locally available in a way it was not elsewhere, so a sweet braise read as a luxury.

Okinawa has its own descendant, rafute, made with awamori and soy. It keeps the skin on the pork the way dongpo rou does, which is the giveaway of its lineage. The kakuni that spread through the mainland via Kagoshima generally takes the skin off.

So a bowl of braised pork belly in a Lower East Side izakaya traces back through Kagoshima, through Nagasaki's trading port, to a poet who was given a thank-you present and decided to cook it for everybody.

Put Karashi on It

Kakuni comes with a dab of karashi, Japanese mustard, and it is not a garnish you should skip.

Karashi is made from mustard seed and water, with no vinegar, which is what separates it from most Western mustards. Without vinegar to soften it, the heat is sharp and goes straight up into your nose rather than sitting on your tongue. It also fades fast, which is why it is served in a small dab rather than spread.

The reason it belongs here is arithmetic. Kakuni is fat, sugar and soy, three things that coat your palate and stay there. Karashi cuts straight through all of it and resets you for the next bite. Without it, the third piece is heavier than the first. With it, you keep going.

Rice underneath, karashi on top. That is the whole meal and it does not need anything else.

Ours

I will be honest with you: there is nothing clever about our kakuni.

No twist, no technique nobody else has, no story about the pork. It is a classic dish, made the way I like it, because I like it a lot. Pork belly, braised long and slow until it gives, rich and fatty and deep.

That is the entire pitch. Some things on our menu are here because we thought of something. This one is here because it is one of the best things in Japanese home cooking and I wanted to eat it.

It is a winter dish in my head and always will be. It is heavy in the right way when it is cold out.

Try It at Juraku

Pork Kakuni is on the menu at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. Get rice with it and use the karashi.

See the rest of the menu.