A Costco-sized pack, split the hour you get home. Three days in the fridge, the rest straight to the freezer.
Pork at Costco often comes two pieces to a pack, three or four kilos together. Look at the price per kilo and there's no reason not to buy it. The problem starts at home. You grill some, put the rest in the fridge whole, and by day four the colour has started to change and you're standing there deciding whether to risk it.
This plan is built around **the decision you make on day one**, not around an order of dishes. Keep only what you'll eat in three days in the fridge, and divide and freeze the rest that same evening. Days four and five run on what you froze — which is precisely why they're a rice bowl and a soup, the two dishes where thawed meat gives nothing away.
American stores sell by cut name. Pork belly is 삼겹살. Anything labelled pork shoulder, Boston butt, or picnic sits near 앞다리살 and 목살 — enough fat running through it to suit boiling and marinating, which is what 수육 and 제육볶음 need. The big Costco pack is usually this.
Pork loin is 등심. It has almost no fat, so it turns dry in a stir-fry — avoid it for anything but 돈까스 or a whole roast. Country-style ribs are cut from near the shoulder and work on the grill. Korean markets also sell packs labelled 불고기용, already sliced thin enough to go straight into a stir-fry; that is the one thing that's genuinely hard to find at an American store.
Open the pack and divide it into single-meal portions. For two or three people, that's roughly 400 to 500 grams a piece. Bag each one and freeze it **pressed flat**. A thick block takes far longer for the centre to freeze, and just as long to thaw later.
Leave no more than three days' worth in the fridge. Anything past that goes to the freezer without agonising over it. To thaw, move a bag to the fridge the night before — left on the counter, the outside thaws while the middle is still frozen, and the surface sits lukewarm far too long.
The first three days run on refrigerated meat, the last two on what you froze. Rearranging the order collapses that split, so it's best left alone.
The night you buy it. A whole piece goes into the pot, so it takes the largest, freshest cut.
See recipe→Marinated and grilled, still on fridge meat. Marinate the night before and the cooking is nothing but grilling.
See recipe→The last of the refrigerated portion. Thin slices into a stir-fry — the least prep of the week.
See recipe→Move a frozen bag to the fridge the night before. A rice bowl is the dish where the state of the meat shows least.
See recipe→The last frozen portion. In soup, thawed and never-frozen meat are hard to tell apart.
See recipe→Freezing itself isn't what ruins the meat; how you freeze and thaw it is. Trapped air dries the surface into pale patches — freezer burn — and those stay tough however you cook them. Pressing the air out of the bag prevents most of it.
Don't refreeze what you've thawed. That's why dividing into **portions you'll use in one go** matters on day one. Thaw one big piece, use half, and the remainder becomes a problem.
This is what the five dishes need. Apart from the meat, most of it keeps.
Tomatoes make the last day's soup much cleaner-tasting, but kimchi will do instead. The list is built so nothing missing sends you back out mid-week.
The gram amounts in the linked recipes come straight from the public dataset, where they serve as reference values for measuring nutrition. A hundred grams of pork is less than one person's share, so cooking it as written won't make a meal.
What this plan fixes is the order and the way you divide it. Decide how many people you're feeding, and let that set the size of the portions you bag on day one.
Refrigerated raw pork darkens over time, the surface turns slippery, and it starts to smell sour or faintly of ammonia. Once there's a smell, cooking won't bring it back. However annoying, throw it out.
Darkening alone isn't proof of spoilage — the exposed face browns naturally. Smell and feel are the more reliable tests. If it's borderline, cook it that day, and if you genuinely can't tell, don't use it.