I've never had the good fortune to eat so successful a pig in my life.
Start with a large piece of butcher fresh pork belly - my pieces had some bones left in. 3kg cost £20 and fed 13 people comfortably. Score the skin and salt, rubbing the salt in with kitchen paper, while pressing the skin to squeeze out the moisture. You can do this up to three times before it gets too salty. On the recommendation of a foodie friend, I left the meat in the fridge uncovered for 2 days to dry out the skin further.
As an experiment, I poured boiling water over part of the skin of one of the pieces - I used a mostly full kettle of boiling water, then patted the skin dry and resalted afterwards. I'd heard this would cause it shrink and give better crackling. I've come to the conclusion that it made no difference in my case.
At least the night before the day of pork, prepare and apply the marinade to the meat, taking care to leave it off the skin. I used...
Chinese 5 spice
Garlic
Ginger
Shallots
Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper
I might also have used...
Soy Sauce
Lemon grass
Sugar
The marinade didn't come through as much as I wanted it to. Although it was there. In fact, at some points I thought it was subtle, and others I thought it was really strong. So, I'll leave that one as it is.
Take some celery, carrots and onions to make a bed for the pork to cook in. It's like using a flavoured rack, something to keep the pork out of the oil and fat that collects. Pour in 200ml of water to keep the moisture flowing.
Cook the pork on gas mark 2, which is about 150C for 3 hours. I placed two in the oven, and swapped the lower and higher half way through. It's a waiting game.
The internet said to cover the pork with foil to keep the moisture in. I forgot to do this, and the results were really good, presumably because throughout the cooking the skin was drying out slowly in readiness for the crisping to come, and because pork belly is so fatty that it would take a lot to dry it out. So, I won't be using foil next time, but maybe it would be better to do so for a different cut of pork.
This is what the two pieces looked like after 3 hours of slow cooking. Notice the top one is a little more crisped.
I removed the pork from the oven in order to heat it to gas mark 7, then put it back in. This is the delicate bit. The first piece of pork I cooked took 11 minutes to crackle, during which time the skin transformed from normal pig skin into fluffy crispy crackling. This wasn't quite what I was after - it was perfect traditional british pork crackling, but when I see chinese pork, the skin hasn't expanded at all, and remains thin and crispy. I consindered leaving the second piece of pork in the oven on low to try to slowly dry out and crisp the skin. However, on cutting up the first piece of pork, it was apparent that I would endanger the beautiful moist succulence that had developed, so I backed down from my experiment.
The second piece, when I did place it in the oven, took 15 minutes to crisp up on gas mark 7. It was the lower of the two for the first run in the oven, and I didn't switch them quite half way through, so it hadn't been cooked as hot. I paid very close attention to avoid burning the skin, and even then it was partly singed. Complacency never pays.
We chopped up the pork and made a mountain, which we then placed in turkish bread and ate, to avoid the need for plates. The fat content of the pork belly ensured that the meat was beautifully moist.
I would still like to know how to get the chinese style skin, and next time, apple sauce may need to be involved.
Otherwise, pork mountain was a success.
