If you love your pork belly and still didn’t find a recipe that would have it all - look no further!!! I found that often if you have meat that melts in your mouth by braising, you sacrifice crispy skin. On the other hand when you cook it in the oven with crispy crackling in mind, your meat often although is soft, not amazingly melting. Especially when you need to crank the oven to crisp your skin, which dries up the meat. This one combines both! Braising and super crispy skin! Credit goes to Gordon Ramsay. I have changed couple of things but the main flavor base and the method (I again slightly amended it) comes from him. Thank you Gordon! I wanted to swear from happiness as I was biting into it!!🤩
Score your pork belly skin in squares or diamonds (the way mine was scored makes it actually much easier to cut later).
Rub skin with generous amount of salt and and oil.
Preheat Oven to 180C.
Use heavy bottom roasting tray if you can. If not you might need to do next step of rendering the fat in a pan.
You first sauté fennel bulb, onion, garlic, bay leaves, star anis and cardamon in oil in same dish where you will roast your pork.
Wait it's got nice colour and started to smell amazing. Original recipe called for moving this mix to the side and put pork belly in the middle of the tray skin down.
However I found that pan or tray needs to be very hot and you will be searing that fat for at least 3-5 min ( needs to look nice and golden ), and in the process of achieving that your onion mix starts to burn. So 3 times I made this recipe, I had to remove fennel mix out of the tray completely. Also this time I used kinda flimsy roasting tray, so it wasn't doing a good job on searing the pork skin, so I had to finish it on the non stick heavy based pan. Worked really well.
Turn your belly skin up and bring back fennel mix. Once heated up again deglaze the tray with white wine. I used 1/2 bottle. Make sure its reasonable quality wine. I never cook with wine I wouldn't drink.
Once smell of alcohol goes away, fill up the tray with chicken stock, and if not enough add some water. You want liquid to get all the way to the skin. be careful not to wet your crispy skin.
Add extra herbs if you would like and black pepper and salt.
While its heating up, rub more fennel seeds into the cracks of the skin.
Bring to boil on the stove, or it won't come to it in the oven.
Put in the oven uncovered for 2.5 hours.
Have some wine!
And this what you will see in 2.5 hours time. Heaven!!!!
Carefully remove from liquid, place on another smaller tray and put back in turned off oven. you just want to keep it warm till you are finished with the sauce.
To make the sauce you can either remove most of fennel/onion bits and reduce the liquid, or what I did - blitz the solid parts in nutri bullet and return to the pan. Just remove star anis and bay leaves out, they will be too bitter. As I wanted to have all the flavours!
Add 1 tbsp of wholegrain mustard, pinch of black pepper and reduce on wide pan until its glossy and thick.
Check for seasoning.
And there you go!
You have the most amazingly tender and flavorsome belly with crispiest skin.
What more can one want!
Recipe says 2 portions despite huge slab of meat, because in our case it was true. We have demolished 1.5kg of pork belly in one seating (well I ate about 1 third of it I think, but still not bad for a chick!).
So let me know how you you ate!!
Enjoy!
Ingredients
Directions
Score your pork belly skin in squares or diamonds (the way mine was scored makes it actually much easier to cut later).
Rub skin with generous amount of salt and and oil.
Preheat Oven to 180C.
Use heavy bottom roasting tray if you can. If not you might need to do next step of rendering the fat in a pan.
You first sauté fennel bulb, onion, garlic, bay leaves, star anis and cardamon in oil in same dish where you will roast your pork.
Wait it's got nice colour and started to smell amazing. Original recipe called for moving this mix to the side and put pork belly in the middle of the tray skin down.
However I found that pan or tray needs to be very hot and you will be searing that fat for at least 3-5 min ( needs to look nice and golden ), and in the process of achieving that your onion mix starts to burn. So 3 times I made this recipe, I had to remove fennel mix out of the tray completely. Also this time I used kinda flimsy roasting tray, so it wasn't doing a good job on searing the pork skin, so I had to finish it on the non stick heavy based pan. Worked really well.
Turn your belly skin up and bring back fennel mix. Once heated up again deglaze the tray with white wine. I used 1/2 bottle. Make sure its reasonable quality wine. I never cook with wine I wouldn't drink.
Once smell of alcohol goes away, fill up the tray with chicken stock, and if not enough add some water. You want liquid to get all the way to the skin. be careful not to wet your crispy skin.
Add extra herbs if you would like and black pepper and salt.
While its heating up, rub more fennel seeds into the cracks of the skin.
Bring to boil on the stove, or it won't come to it in the oven.
Put in the oven uncovered for 2.5 hours.
Have some wine!
And this what you will see in 2.5 hours time. Heaven!!!!
Carefully remove from liquid, place on another smaller tray and put back in turned off oven. you just want to keep it warm till you are finished with the sauce.
To make the sauce you can either remove most of fennel/onion bits and reduce the liquid, or what I did - blitz the solid parts in nutri bullet and return to the pan. Just remove star anis and bay leaves out, they will be too bitter. As I wanted to have all the flavours!
Add 1 tbsp of wholegrain mustard, pinch of black pepper and reduce on wide pan until its glossy and thick.
Check for seasoning.
And there you go!
You have the most amazingly tender and flavorsome belly with crispiest skin.
What more can one want!
Recipe says 2 portions despite huge slab of meat, because in our case it was true. We have demolished 1.5kg of pork belly in one seating (well I ate about 1 third of it I think, but still not bad for a chick!).
So let me know how you you ate!!
Enjoy!
