I ended up packing on about 20 lb of probably all or mostly muscle to an already "obese" frame ever since I started training seriously, and one of the key ingredients to my gains is the food that I eat.
So, I'm going to share with you what I normally eat, and how I prepare it.
To be honest, while I would like to start posting a variety of different recipes on my site, I tend to eat the same thing all the time! So this could be the first in only a handful of “recipes” I end up posting.
Anyway, this is a simple way of cooking pork that’s delicious and quick and easy to make. I used to cook this in the slow cooker, but now it's done in the Instant Pot 6-in-1 pressure cooker. It’s a lot faster, and the final results are pretty much the same.
Ingredients
- A huge piece of pork (I used “boneless pork sirloin half”) 3.336 kg or about 7.34 lb
- Carrots (5)
- Onions (1.5)
- Garlic (3)
- Korean Bulgogi sauce
Optionally you could add potatoes and other ingredients. I forgot about the potatoes, but that’s fine because the pressure cooker ended up being pretty full anyways.
Also, sometimes I’ll use kalbi sauce instead of the bulgogi sauce. Tastes great either way.
Instructions
First, need to prepare the food.
1. I take the pork out of the package and rinse it with water.
You could brown the pork at this point, but I choose not to. I wanted to make this as quickly as possible, and didn’t want to do any extra dishes.
I don’t cut away any fat, because it’s tasty in my opinion. And the liquid animal fat helps lubricate the food so it slides down my gullet a lot easier.
After rinsing, I put the pork into the pressure cooker pot.
2. Next, I cut up the carrots, onions and garlic.
First, start peeling the carrots.
Then, cut them up into smaller pieces and throw it into the pot.
Next up, onions. I only used 1 and a half onions, but sometimes I would add more.
To take off the skin, I just cut the onion in half first and then rip off the outer layer. There’s probably a better way of doing this, but this has been working for me so far.
Cut up the onions into smaller pieces, and throw it into the pot.
At this point, it’s difficult to open my eyes and I’m almost in tears from cutting up those damn onions but luckily there’s only one more ingredient to slice up, and that’s the garlic.
I used 3 cloves of garlic this time.
Same deal as the onions: I cut it in half and start peeling away the outer layer.
Then I’ll cut them into tinier pieces and put it all into the pot.
At this point, I’ll mix the carrots, onions and garlic with one hand.
3. Lastly, I’ll add about 5-6 tablespoons of the Korean bulgogi sauce along with 2-3 tablespoons of water (mainly to wash off all the sauce from the spoon).
Now that all the ingredients are in the pot, it’s time to cook!
I take the metal pot and place it in the pressure cooker.
Screw on the lid and make sure that the valve of the lid is set to “sealing”.
I set the pressure cooker to “Meat/Stew” and increase the time to 70 minutes.
Initially I set the time to 60 minutes, because that was the setting the last time this was used to cook pork (I didn't cook it last time). Then I realized that I was cooking a larger quantity of pork than before, so I figured an extra 10 minutes should be fine.
Post cooking notes: Turns out, it wasn’t as tender as I would have liked it, so next time I’ll try for 80 minutes or so.
After I set it to cook, I went downstairs to workout.
This pressure cooker takes a few minutes to pressurize (or whatever it is it does) before the countdown begins.
After my workout, I came back upstairs and seen that the pressure cooker had automatically set itself to “keep warm”.
At this point I turn the valve to “Venting” and wait a few minutes before opening the lid.
I hope that I didn’t mess anything up because it’s my first time using this!
Upon opening the lid, I set my eyes to this:
Looks and smells damn good. Let’s see if it tastes good:
Tastes delicious, but not as tender as I would like it. I think the next time I cook 3 kg or 7+ lb of pork, I’ll increase the time to 80 minutes.
I’ve seen videos of people cooking pork in the slow cooker or pressure cooker in a similar way that I do, and then making something called “pulled pork” and eating it with bread. Personally, I like to eat my meats with rice.
This is what a typical meal looks like:
Usually on a training day, I like to add an egg to my meal.
Before I dig in, I throw in a fistful of baby spinach and squirt on some Siracha hot sauce.
This bowl is a 1-Quart serving bowl made by Corelle. 1 quart is 4 cups, 1/4 of a gallon or nearly 1 litre (0.946352946 litres to be exact). It’s a good size for big, manly meals.
And for this type of meal, I don’t use chopsticks. I use a big metal table spoon. It’s a lot more effective to shovel food into my mouth, and a lot easier to get the last grains of rice out of the bowl.
Occasionally, I’ll sprinkle some cashew nuts on top. I like the taste and the crunchiness of cashews mixed in with a bowl of rice and meat.
Oh man…it was so good.
Not bad for my first try using this pressure cooker! Had a slight heart burn after I ate this, but it was worth it.
