Gear up for another easy weeknight dinner with this Miso Pork & Green Beans recipe! It doesn’t get much simpler than this one pot meal, but don’t be fooled by how easy it is to make. The miso sauce brings a ton of flavor to rich and juicy ground pork. The green beans are hard seared for flavor and texture, then mixed back in once the pork and sauce are cooked. Serve it all over a bed of rice if you’d like!
all about
Miso Paste
While miso paste is basically just fermented soy beans ground up into a paste, what makes it so special is the umami that it brings to recipes. To get the different colors and flavors of miso, they’re usually mixed with one other flavoring ingredient and fermented for different lengths of time.
- White miso – The most versatile type of miso, this one is made with rice and soybeans. It’s fermented for a shorter time than the other colors, so it’s mild and sweet. It’s great in dressings, soups, and marinades and pairs well with veggies, seafood, poultry, and pork.
- Yellow miso – Made with barley and soybeans, yellow miso has a stronger flavor than white miso, but not as strong as red. It’s great for dressings, soups, marinades, and glazes and pairs well with veggies, poultry, and pork.
- Red miso – Red miso is also usually made with barley and soybeans, then fermented the longest of the 3 varieties, making it the strongest in flavor. A little goes a long way here! It’s great for stews, glazes, and marinades and pairs well with beef or hearty dishes.
Ingredients and Substitutions
Here’s what you’ll need to recreate this Miso Pork & Green Beans at home:
- Ground pork – I recommend 90 or 93% lean ground pork to keep the fat content down a bit in this recipe. I’ve tried this recipe with ground beef as well and while tasty, the white miso definitely pairs better with pork.
- Green beans – Just regular ole’ green beans are what you need here. Don’t try to get fancy with the French green beans, they’re too skinny to hold up to blistering and then sitting in the sauce as well as the regular ones.
- Green onions – For this recipe, we use a whole bunch of green onions. A little more than half of it goes in during the cooking process and the rest is reserved for garnish. You could skip them if you don’t like them.
- Miso sauce – For the miso sauce, I used a combo of soy sauce, brown sugar, miso paste, ginger, rice vinegar, sesame oil, chili garlic sauce, and black pepper I thickened it up with a little cornstarch. I like this sauce because you can just throw everything into a jar and shake it up really good to combine everything. The cornstarch will thicken it up once it hits the heat of the pan.
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Recipe
Miso Pork and Green Beans
Ingredients
- 1 lb 90% lean ground pork
- 12 oz green beans, trimmed and halved, (340 grams)
- 1 bunch green onions, chopped and divided
- 1 1/2 tbsp vegetable oil
Miso Sauce
- 3 tbsp low sodium soy sauce
- 3 tbsp brown sugar
- 2 tbsp white miso paste
- 2 tbsp fresh grated ginger
- 2 tbsp water
- 1 tbsp rice vinegar
- 1 tsp sesame oil
- 1 tsp chili garlic sauce
- 1 tsp cornstarch
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
Instructions
- Add all sauce ingredients except cornstarch and water to a jar and shake until combined. Whisk cornstarch into 2 tbsp of water, then add to jar with other sauce ingredients and shake again. Set aside.
- Heat half of the vegetable oil in a large skillet over high heat. Once the oil is shimmery and hot, add green beans, tossing to coat in the oil. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally for about 3 minutes until the green beans have turned bright green and have some blister marks. Remove the green beans from the hot skillet and set aside.
- Return skillet to heat and lower to medium-high heat. Add remaining oil to the skillet. Once hot and shimmery, add ground pork, breaking apart with a spatula. Continue to cook and break the pork apart until very little pink remains in the pork.
- Add the sauce to the pork, allowing it to come to a boil and stirring it in to coat the pork evenly. Add 3/4 of the green onions, stirring to distribute and continuing to cook until the pork is cooked through.
- Serve with remaining green onions over a bed of rice, if desired (not included in nutrition info).
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