Cook crackle and pop...into your mouth. A fail safe recipe to get your pork belly crispy every time
There’s one piece of food that sums me up in a nutshell. Crispy pork belly. Slow cooked tender flesh blanketed by a salty crispy skin that crunches between your teeth and explodes in your mouth with delicious fatty flavour. It’s a beautiful experience.
I have been eating crispy pork belly since I grew teeth strong enough to eat it and I've been cooking it for over a decade. In the Philippines lechon (spit roast pig) is the equivalent of turkey in the west. It’s reserved for a celebration. Unlike turkey however the pig is a delicious, fatty and decadent meat whereas turkey is dry and only eaten for diet food apart from Christmas where you have to cover it with bacon to give it some semblance of taste and luxury. Anyway, enough of the turkey rant. I’ve been asked plenty of times for my fool proof crispy pork belly recipe, so here it is.
Crispy pork belly recipe for 2-4 ppl (depending on how greedy you are or whether you are serving other dishes alongside it).
Cooking time 3.5 hrs.
Ingredients:
1 kg pork belly. A good quality piece of meat is key. I buy mine from my local butchers, preferably with the ribs still on so that the meat stays succulent. The pork is rare breed and free range, your quality of meat doesn’t affect the crackling but definitely the taste of the flesh.
1 teaspoon of fine sea salt
1 teaspoon of flaked sea salt
1 teaspoon five spice
1 teaspoon fine black or white pepper
2 table spoon of oil
2 lemongrass
TIP: If your pork belly does not have bone in and your pork belly sinks in the middle(so the skin is sagging down in the middle) I would recommend quartering an onion to sit under the pork belly so that it props up the meat, the reason being is that when fat renders it sometimes drips down and pools in the sinking meat making it soggy and harder to crisp.
Method
1. Make a mix of the oil, five spice, fine salt and pepper and set aside.
2. Ideally you would prep the pork belly hours before dabbing the skin with a dry kitchen paper towel to take away extra moisture. You might then be organised enough to put in the fridge for a couple of hours and then take it out an hour before cooking but lets assume you are disorganised like me.
3. If you haven’t done step 2 you should at least take the pork out of the fridge an hour before cooking, you shouldn’t really cook meat straight from the fridge to the pan anyway. Score the pork skin in a criss-cross pattern, deep enough so that it cuts into the first layer of fat beneath the actual skin but not so deep it cuts into the flesh. Each slice should be about two cm apart. The end should look like a diamond pattern on the skin.
4. Turn the belly over and rub the oil spice mix from earlier all over the flesh BUT NOT the skin. Once finished turn the belly over so its skin side up and dab the skin with a kitchen towel making sure to remove any moisture or oil.
5. Put the belly in a roasting tray. Bash the lemongrass and place under the pork belly. As mentioned before if your pork belly is dipping in the middle and has no bone in, place some chunks of onion underneath to prop up the skin.
6. Now salt the skin with the sea salt flakes making sure some fall into the crevices the scoring has made.
7. Heat your oven very high (about 200 celcius for a fan oven and 220 with a normal oven) once heated, put the pork belly on the middle tray and cook at this heat for 30 minutes.
8. Once finished remove the pork and you should see the pork crackling is starting to form already. Now turn the oven down to about 100/120 degrees celcius and cook for about 2 ½ hours. To test if the pork is ready take the pork out and slide a knife into it, it should slide in easily, if this is the case the slow cooking of the pork is done.
9. If there any particularly soft parts of skin that look soggy you can put a pinch more flaked sea salt over the specific problem area. Now turn the oven back high again to 200/220 and place the pork back in for 30 minutes. This will finish off the crackling.
10. Take out, be careful as the oven is so hot so smoke will blow out which will make your eyes water. Let the meat rest for about 20 minutes.
11. Once rested, slice the ribs off and then cut the belly into bite size cubes. In Philippines we traditionally serve this mang tomas (a liver sauce) which I don’t know how to make. I like to make a common Filipino dipping sauce called 'sawsawan', made of vinegar, soya sauce, a little chilli to infuse some heat and calamansi (sweet lime) or just a squeeze of lime if you can't find calamansi. Sawsawan provides a great accompaniment which really cuts through the fat. You can make it by using 2 tablespoons of coconut/white wine/apple vinegar in a small shallow bowl. 4 tablespoons of soya sauce and a squeeze of lime juice. I then add chilli oil or you can stab a birds eye chilli several times and put into the dipping sauce to infuse. Vietnamese nuoc cham sauce also makes a great complimentary dipping sauce.
12. Serve everything with jasmine rice (and probably some veggies to make yourself feel better about all the delicious pork fat!).
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