Pork Belly is a cut of pork (usu­ally used for bacon) that most home cooks don’t pre­pare, mainly because it takes a few days which can be kind of daunt­ing. The thing to remem­ber about recipes that take a few days is that you’re not actu­ally work­ing on the food that whole time. In this case you put a dry rub on the meat and put it in the fridge for 24 hours, then go watch “Top Chef”.

I had never actu­ally seen pork belly out­side of a restau­rant kitchen until recently when Rowe Farms started sell­ing it. I’d love to see it avail­able more often, it’s such a deli­cious cut and so rich that you only need a small por­tion to sat­isfy leav­ing more room on the plate for veg­gies. This is a per­fect recipe for those try­ing to fol­low Michael Pollan’s advice, “Eat food, not a lot, mostly greens.”

Rowe Farms pork belly brais­ing in Innis & Gunn oak-aged beer

I usu­ally dry rub the belly and let it sit overnight, then sear and slow braise in the oven. The end result is the rea­son some­one invented the word ‘melt’. If you are pre­pared to wait a few days for din­ner, this will be well worth it. I’m lucky enough to be able to call one of the country’s great­est chefs when I want some advice on cook­ing. Anthony Walsh, Canoe’s Executive Chef and loyal Fiesta Farms shop­per has this advice. “When you do a dry rub, you do a wet cook, so brais­ing is the way to go. Do it with a big, chunky mire­poix so it releases its flavours slowly. Later I would take that mire­poix and chop it up small to serve in the final dish — it’s full of pork belly flavour.”

Ingredients

spice blend : 1/2 tsp each of clove, nut­meg, paprika, dried sage + 1/4 tsp of cin­na­mon
mire­poix (onion, car­rot, celery)

beer (in this case Innis & Gunn)

orange juice

Steps

1. Massage the dry rub into the meat and refrig­er­ate overnight.
2. Score the fat, sea­son well with salt and pepper.
3. Sear the scored fat till brown and crispy. Remove from pot, add mire­poix and sautee.
4. Place bel­lies fat side up on top of mire­poix with just enough liq­uid, I used a bot­tle of Innis & Gunn and some orange juice, to come up to the top of the belly but not cover.
5. Then top with parch­ment and cover with tin­foil or lid.
6. Cook 1 1/2 to 2 hours at 300, then cook uncov­ered for another hour or so.

When I worked for Anthony Walsh, chef Johny Butler would often do an amuse using toasted brioche, pork belly and a fried quail egg as a play on break­fast. Makes a beau­ti­ful plate and tastes fantastic.

I was inspired to cook this after read­ing a recipe that’s a twist on cas­soulet in Kristina Groeger’s excel­lent blog http://kristinagroeger.com/

final dish

So the final plate ends up a com­bi­na­tion of those two inspi­ra­tions — break­fast and cas­soulet. I served the belly over beans that were added in the last 45 min­utes of cook­ing and made a com­posed salad of bacon, egg, beets and blue cheese vinaigrette.