Perfect Pork Belly & Crackling!

How to make the perfect pork crackling that will have your mouth watering!!!

Pork Belly is so much easier to cook than a pork shoulder, leg etc...it doesn't dry out like many other pork roasts can tend to do.

• I take a slab of pork belly and score the skin (ask your butcher to do this for you), rub it with salt and then layer an oven proof dish with 2 layers of tin foil, you surround the pork with foil just like a little package with the top uncovered, bake for 2 hours at 150C bake. 
• If you want to make it super moist then inside the foil pour some milk and you will have the pork melting in your mouth! (you don't have to do this) 
• Once cooked remove the pork from the oven and slice off the skin, cut into bite sized pieces, place the pork belly in the foil and leave to rest. 
• Bake the skin for another 10-30 minutes at 180+C , if the skin hasn't crisped up by baking it at a high temp then you can grill it but watch it very carefully! 
• Best results come from baking it slowly 
• All pork belly cooks slightly different too, free range crackles every time whereas non free range can be harder to crackle. I hope that helps the beginner pork belly cooks out there ;) 

Pork belly with Five spice veggies!

Pork belly with Five spice veggies!

Ingredients:

• Bok Choy (discard stalks - unless you can be bothered cooking them separately!)
• Green beans
• Orange capsicum
• 3 small peeled Shallots sliced
• 1 de-seeded Chilli sliced
• 2cm piece fresh ginger
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 2 Tbsps Butter
• 2 tsps Chinese five spice
• 2 Tbsps Gluten Free soy sauce
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp tomato sauce

Sauté your shallots, chilli, ginger, garlic in butter and sesame oil, once tender add the spice, sugar, soy sauce and tomato sauce, add green beans, capsicum and cook but still crisp, then add bok choy at the end for quick cooking and add a couple tablespoons of water. Serve underneath roasted pork belly.

Roasted pork belly

Preheat oven to 150c fan bake. Score skin of pork belly and rub salt all over, cook uncovered for 2 hours, remove skin and grill to crisp!

Crispy Pork Belly!

This is a thai version of cripsy pork belly! Definitely not for the faint-hearted ;)
This takes a lot of preparation but completely worth it....the orginal recipe can be found here: http://3hungrytummies.blogspot.co.nz/2009/11/muu-krop-crispy-pork.html

• 1 kg pork belly or more
• 2 Tablespoons of kikkoman gluten free soy sauce or Coconut Aminos
• a sprinkle of sugar
• dash of pepper
• beef tallow for deep frying

Marinate your pork belly with the soy, sugar and pepper for at least 4 hours or overnight.  Remove marinated pork from fridge and steam over a steamer or pot steamer for 1 hour, check the water and top up with boiling water if necessary.

Remove pork from the steamer, prick the pork skin all over with a folk. Mix 2tbs of salt and 1tbs of white vinegar into a paste and rub it over the pork skin. Cut pork into 2cm strips and leave them in the fridge uncovered overnight, this is a very important step to dry the pork out.

Fry pork strips in hot beef tallow until golden delicious.  Drain well and it's ready to be eaten!!
I didn't want to overcook mine so I removed them, sliced the pork skin off and put the skin back into the deep fryer until crispy!  I kept the stock from the steamer and then made a gravy with it, I found it too rich with the pork belly so instead we opted for some sweet chilli sauce and it was AMAZING!!

New Layout and some of my Fav Eats!

Once again I've been a little sidetracked and not kept a serious food journal for sometime, I have been tracking on the DailyBurn and I have an app on my phone that lets me input the data daily so that's how I've been managing to keep my weight down but I can't give you a report on that because I'm on the free membership.  My weight is still at 66kgs and although I've briefly seen the late 65's I'm not quite there yet, on other peoples scales I am but I'm going to stick to the consistency of mine.  I'm feeling pretty great at this weight and if I stayed here I would be pretty happy, ofcourse my ulimate goal is to get to the early 60's and that goal is still in sight!

I hope you all are enjoying the new layout and the links to some recipes, the success story and my story, hopefully makes it a little easier to navigate :)

Here's a couple of my fav eats:

Twice baked five spice Pork Belly (pre done from Countdown) with mashed pumkin, cauliflower and cheese sauce)

Scrambled Eggs with cream cheese and smoked salmon

This morning's omelet which was filled with cheese, cream cheese and smoked salmon! Truly amazing and soo filling.