Dear fellow Hivers are you thinking to yourself "Here's another barbecue post"? If so, don't let the picture fool you, because we've tried a recipe for a second time and this time around we thought it safe enough to prepare for loved ones and that is crispy roasted pork belly.
We wanted to prepare this dish for a long time now for family members, but for certain valid reasons had to postpone it several times. Then the opportunity presented itself - in the long weekend because of Suriname's Independence day - so we decided to come together and make a Holiday out of it and I contributed the pork belly we already had in the freezer.
Moisture is the enemy of crispy pork belly, so preparations - among which the curing process - have to be done the night before and for even better results a day in advance. Firstly, we pricked - not punctured - the skin with a fork, without damaging it. Just the outer layer of the skin. Padded the skin several times down with paper towels.
It's also preferable that the meat doesn't have any bones, so we deboned the meat carefully and sliced approximately every five centimeters in between. Not too deep; just enough to have a demarcation line for later. Because of our pork belly being on the longer side we also cut it in half, so that it could bake evenly.
This recipe is fairly simple as there's few ingredients needed: salt, black pepper, five spice powder, (brown) sugar and sesame oil for the baking process. We mixed the salt, pepper, five spice and sugar in a bowl and tasted if the concoction was right. The salt and pepper were the stars, so not too much sugar and five spice. We then proceeded to coat the meat between the slices, under the skin and on the side. The powdered mixture should in no capacity go on the skin.
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After coating the pork belly pieces, we placed the meat on thick aluminum foil (1) and encased the meat in such a way that only the skin was left exposed (2). Then we covered the exposed skin with enough salt, to extract as much moisture as possible (3). Thereafter, the meat was placed in a baking sheet (4) and put in the refrigerator.
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As stated before, the pork belly could be removed the next morning, but we opted to let the meat cure for approximately 24 hours. After pulling the pork from the refrigerator, we removed all the salt on top of the skin and brushed some sesame oil on the skin (5). That's when we pre-heated the oven at 400° F.
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Depending on the oven we started to let the pork belly bake for one hour and because of not remembering how long it had taken to bake the last time, we checked the skin by scraping over it with a fork every once in a while after that one hour mark. The skin had to be crispy.
When the meat was cooked, but the skin was not quite crispy, we changed the setting from baking to broiling. When the skin reached that golden brown color (6) and felt crispy with the fork, we turned the oven off and let it sit for a few minutes. Then we cut the pork into bite sized pieces (7), using the demarcation lines as a guide.
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The end result of the crispy roasted pork belly - with the rest of the barbecue platter - was well received by the rest of family. One even asked for a repeat as soon as possible and another requested for the recipe. This recipe is simple - as stated before - but is only time consuming and a lot of patience is needed. Good time management also for the food preparation.
