This is a very quick weeknight Soy-Honey Pork you can put together in just 25 minutes, using ingredients that most people have at home. The salty sweet soy-honey pork is juicy and the coleslaw is refreshing.
It’s no secret. Diana and I love food with delicious, strong flavors—including Chinese food. Chinese flavors are often a mixture of the four important flavor profiles: salty, sweet, spicy, and sour. For this one, we’re hitting three of those four flavors (for the sake of the baby, we’ll skip the spicy). It’s extremely easy to put together and you can have food on your table in 25 minutes, start to finish.
We’re using thin slices of pork meat here that we marinade for just 10 minutes. You can, however, use thicker cuts, and marinade it for a few hours or overnight. The flavor will be much deeper and the pork much more fantastic.
Soy-Honey Pork with Creamy Coleslaw
Ingredients
- 6 pork chops
- 3 tbsp soy sauce
- 1 tbsp oyster sauce
- 1/2 tbsp sesame oil
- 1 1/2 tbsp honey
- 1/2 red cabbage
- 1 carrot
- 2 tbsp mayonnaise
- 2 tsp sugar or to taste
- 1/2 tbsp white vinegar
- 1 tsp balsamic vinegar
- salt and pepper to taste
- 2 green onion leaves chopped
Instructions
- In order to make the soy-honey pork marinade, simply mix the soy, oyster, sesame and honey together in a medium bowl. Now, usually I love my 3:2:1:1 mix (soy:oyster:sesame:honey/fresh chili), but this time the oyster sauce would have made it too salty. I still keep it, but halfed it, and I increased the honey. Because we’re not marinating the meat for long, you want a stronger sauce.
- For the meat, obviously, fatty pork is much better than the dry, shoe-leather lean pork. Of course, Diana seems to like the dry, shoe-leather lean pork, even though it’s dry and tastes like shoe leather. Here you can compromise, and do half dry, shoe-leather pork and half delicious, juicy, fatty pork.
- Cover the meat with the soy-honey mixture and leave it in a bowl to rest for about ten minutes, while you prepare the coleslaw.
- For the coleslaw, simply shred the cabbage and the carrots. For us, we like to chop the cabbage by hand (makes for larger, chewier pieces) but still shred the cabbage.
- Make the sauce in a separate bowl by mixing the mayonnaise, sugar, and vinegars. It should be sweet, but not too sweet, with a tangy profile at the end from the vinegar. The balsamic gives it more of a body (so it doesn’t taste so thin) and gives it a little color. Add the chopped green onions to the mix, and add more according to your taste.
- Always make the dressing in a separate bowl, because you need the sugar to dissolve first. Pour the dressing over the coleslaw and let it rest a few minutes while you fry the pork.
- Melt some oil in a pan over medium-high heat (although, if you love the smell of smoke, put it on high—the flavor of the pork will be better, and the meat juicier, but your pan might not like the burnt honey too much.) With the thin pork meat we had, the meat is pretty much done at this temperature when it is brown. That will be about 3 minutes on one side, and less than 2 minutes on the other side.
- Remove from heat and set aside. I like to add the soy-honey marinade into the pan and boil it down over medium heat, careful not to burn it (always boil marinades used on meats). This will make it extra thick. Pour it over the pork and enjoy with the coleslaw.
- Bon appetit!
