Ever had trouble finding Japanese recipes that were easy to make?
We now have "cooking Japanese with ease", our full recipe book and video course with step-by-step tutorials on your favorite recipes.
Filipinos like their breakfast hearty but easy to prepare, like tocino.
It’s easy to spot this dish, as you’ll never be wrong with its sweet flavor. It’s usually also served not only on the breakfast table, but also in many eateries around the country as a part of their breakfast menus.
Tocino is a type of preserved meat that’s undergone the process of curing.
The meat you can use for this recipe can be chicken, pork, or beef. But pork is what’s usually sold in wet markets and in supermarkets.
Though pork tocino is easily accessible from the supermarkets as an easy-to-cook version, this pork tocino recipe is actually easy enough to follow if you want something homemade!
Another feature of this recipe is that the traditional recipe includes salitre (saltpeter), giving it a reddish color.
However, as salitre is a strong chemical, the modern way of cooking homemade pork tocino is done without salitre.
Commercial producers of pork tocino have also followed suit, as you’d usually see advertisements of packed tocino marketing their product as “No salitre added.”
If, however, you want to achieve that traditional reddish color, you can always use food coloring.
In this post we'll cover:
Homemade pork tocino recipe peparation
Though the idea of preserving meat for future consumption might scare some, the procedure for this tocino recipe is actually simple! It only involves mixing the other ingredients and then adding the pork.
After, you’d let it sit overnight in the refrigerator. After that, it’s ready to be cooked any time!
Cooking, on the other hand, only involves frying it. Since the pork already has its own fat, you may opt not to use cooking oil; you can just let the pork be fried in its own fat.
Partnered with warm rice, sunny-side-up eggs, sliced tomatoes, and hot coffee, this will up your mood in the mornings!
Homemade pork tocino recipe
Ingredients
- 6 lbs pork shoulder
- 2½ cups pineapple juice
- 1⅓ cups Coke or Pepsi
- 1⅓ cups ketchup
- 1 cup low-sodium soy sauce
- 2½ cups dark brown sugar
- 2½ tbsp garlic powder
- 2½ tbsp salt
- 3 tsp ground black pepper
Instructions
- 48 hours before cooking, slice the pork shoulder and place in a ceramic baking dish.
- Make the marinade:
- Whisk together pineapple juice, Coke, ketchup, soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic powder, salt, and pepper.
- Pour marinade over meat, making sure it's well covered by the sauce.
- Cover tightly and refrigerate no less than 48 hours and up to 5 days.
- When ready to cook, pour meat and marinade into a large saucepot and cook on high until boiling.
- In batches, move meat from pot to skillet using tongs and cook until sauce reduces and thickens, and meat cooks thoroughly (about 5-7 minutes).
- Serve and enjoy!
Nutrition
Ever had trouble finding Japanese recipes that were easy to make?
We now have "cooking Japanese with ease", our full recipe book and video course with step-by-step tutorials on your favorite recipes.
Joost Nusselder, the founder of Bite My Bun is a content marketer, dad and loves trying out new food with Japanese food at the heart of his passion, and together with his team he's been creating in-depth blog articles since 2016 to help loyal readers with recipes and cooking tips.
