(light music)
(characters speaking in foreign language)
(character inhaling deeply)
(light music)
- [Alvin] Hello there.
Welcome back to another episode of "Anime with Alvin."
Today, I'll be taking on the Skytree Pork Bowl
from "Silver Spoon," a towering monstrous bowl of pork
on top of probably not enough rice
but still delicious anyway.
This magnificent creation seems to utilize
many, many different cuts of pork,
so what we have here is four pounds of pork tenderloin,
a pound of pork loin, bone-in,
a pound of thinly sliced pork shoulder,
and two pounds of pork belly without skin.
So to start, I'm gonna go ahead and slice each
of these cuts into manageable pieces
and place them in their own Ziploc bag for marination.
If I put them all together,
they might get mixed up and the cook time will be different
for each cut, so I wanna make sure that they're separate.
And I guess it's just more fun to have them all
in their own little bag hanging out.
Once they've been divided into their proper sizes
and proper bags, we're gonna go ahead and make our sauce.
I'm gonna add in one cup of sugar
and six tablespoons of water.
The first part involves making a caramel out of this sauce
before adding in the rest of the ingredients.
Once this color is a beautiful amber,
I'm adding in 1 1/2 cups of boiling water
and letting that dissolve.
When that looks good,
in goes about a cup and two tablespoons of soy sauce,
3/4 cups of sake, 1/2 cup of mirin,
and two large garlic gloves which have been grated right in.
This gets brought to a simmer
and then removed from heat to cool.
We're also gonna make rice.
In a rice cooker,
in goes about two cups of short grain white rice.
Before it can be cooked, it does need to always be washed.
This goes to the sink where I run it through water
roughly three times so that the starches are loose
and the water runs clear after the final rinse.
Now this can go back in the pot.
We simply press the white rice cook button and let it cook.
All the marinade gets divided amongst our pork evenly
until each one has a healthy amount.
Bags need to get their air squished out as much as possible,
patted into an even layer,
and placed onto a tray to chill for about two hours.
After two hours, I like to take the excess marinade,
drain it back into the pot,
and reduce this until it becomes nice and sticky.
Somewhere in the middle of that process,
I like to make sure that the gunk is removed
so that it doesn't get incorporated into the final glaze.
So instead of having to toss the marinade,
it ends up being a nice glaze that we can finish
our meat with later, nice.
In the anime, they do a lot of cooking outdoors,
so I thought it would be fair to grill all of our pork
over an open flame to get that real nice smoky flavor.
Our lovely culinary talent Rachel has been able
to set and build this fire for us,
so shout-out to her for doing that.
And we're going to proceed by grilling one cut at a time,
first starting with the pork belly,
hoping that the excess fat will help lubricate the grill
for later usage.
We definitely grilled this a little too hot
and did not take them and flip them in time,
ending up with a couple of burned ones, but that's okay.
I ate those offscreen.
We now proceed with the rest of the cuts,
starting from the thickest to the thinnest.
So gonna go and cook the tenderloin
until both sides are nice and delicious,
followed by the little bit of loin that we cut off the bone,
and finally ending with the thinly sliced pork shoulder.
Pretty much flash cooks almost instantly over this fire.
After their long time of separation,
all of the cuts now join together
in one large bowl and tossed with the extra glaze
that we had made earlier so that everybody is happy
and gets another coating of flavor
before entering the bowl of doom, me.
Now that our rice is ready,
it is now time to assemble this Skytree Pork Bowl.
Definitely packing in a lotta rice for this one
to hold up to all that meat.
And now the fun begins.
My strategy is to first start with the thicker
and chunkier pieces to form the base of this
and going thinner as I rise to the top.
That means a lotta the pork belly and the pork tenderloin
make its way into the foundation,
while slices of the thinner pork loin
and the very, very, very thin pork shoulder serve
as a way to drape and finish off this magnificent creation.
And I have to say, the name Skytree Pork Bowl
seems to be a very fitting title
for what we have made today.
That is beauty.
That is a work of art, oh, oh.
The work of art has fallen.
I put it back.
No one's gonna notice.
And there you have it, the Skytree Pork Bowl
from "Silver Spoon," finished with extra glaze
that we had left in the mixing bowl.
The question here is not whether this is delicious.
The real question is, who is going to hold me back
from eating this entire thing?
This is so good that I will eat the whole thing.
Oh wait, there's a crew watching.
Yeah, I guess I should probably share.
Many smiles were had in the studio that day
as we all gathered around the bowl like a campfire
and picked at it until it was basically nothing,
and we were all very full with the meat sweats.
What I can also say was that it was nearly impossible
to eat any of the rice,
as it was still buried under the mountain of meat.
But nevertheless, we forced Steve to take it home
and he ate it later and said it was good.
(light music continues)