Roast pork

Roast pork

1 kg pork belly

Blanch the pork in wok of hot water until the skin can be poke through.
Drain the pork belly until dry and poke the skin with skewer or anything sharp as many holes as you can but dont poke through the fats. Then use dry towel to dry up the skin.
Then turn over to the meat side and cut into about 1 inch thick but do not cut through the fats too.
Then season with the following seasoning into the slits and only the meat. Do not season the skin.

Seasonings:
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 pc of nam yue(red fermented bean curd) with a tsp of the sauce that came in the bottle. ( mashed up the beancurd)
1/2 tsp five-spice powder
Pinch of pepper

Crispy Roast Pork Belly Procedures
Vinegar
Coarse salt

Method:
To prepare the seasonings:
Combine the above seasoning and mix well. Set aside.

Coat the meat with seasonings evenly. Make sure there‘s no seasonings on the skin otherwise the five-spice powder will darken it.

Wrap the pork meat with foil and leave the skin facing up unwrapped. Place in fridge, let air dry overnight in fridge.

Preheat oven to 200C/395F.
Remove pork from fridge . Let rest at room temperature for a while. Poke the skin with skewer evenly once again. Wipe dry. Then apply some vinegar on the skin and cover the skin with coarse salt. Bake in preheated oven for about 20 minutes until the salt is harden. Then remove the salt from the skin and clear all the salt if on the meat. Then remove the foil and put on the rack but put a foil at the bottom of the rack so that the oil can be collected for later use. Then continue to bake  until you get enough cracklings.

The tricks of making crispy cracklings:
First, the skin must be very dry. Second, poke as many holes as possible. While grilling, the fat inside the skin turns really hot, then get released from the holes. That produces an effect of a kind of “frying” the skin.. So, it turns crispy.

Please don’t poke too deep through the skin though itherwise the skin won’t be crispy any more .

The cooking time depends on how thick and how big the pork belly is. Please adjust accordingly.

Happy roasting
Kelly's Kitchen@ Ipoh