Cantonese · Main
Siu Yuk (Crackling Roast Pork Belly)
- Advanced
- 40 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, ferment tang with real depth behind it, melting away silken.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg pork belly in one piece, skin on, ribs removed, 4 cm thick
- 20 g fine sea salt, for the flesh
- 10 g caster sugar
- 8 g five spice powder
- 4 g ground white pepper
- 25 g naam yu (fermented red bean curd), mashed
- 15 ml Shaoxing wine
- 45 ml Chinese white rice vinegar
- 400 g coarse rock salt, for the skin cap
- flaky salt, to finish
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
FermentationRoasting in a hot ovenBlanching & shocking
The words inside
Pork BellyWhole-Muscle vs. Fermented Salami: The Two ChurchesChinese Five-Spice
Allergen screen
Found: alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Blanch the belly skin side up in boiling water for 4 minutes, until the skin turns from waxy to matte and firm, then dry it and prick the skin all over, 40 to 50 punctures per 10 cm square, through the skin but never down into the meat. 4 min
- Rub the salt, sugar, five spice, pepper, naam yu and wine into the flesh and cut sides only, keeping every trace off the skin, then sit the piece skin up on a rack and refrigerate uncovered for 24 hours. 600 min
- Wipe the skin with the vinegar, wall the meat in a tight foil boat so only the skin is exposed, pack the rock salt over the skin in a 1 cm slab and roast at 200C (390F) for 40 minutes. 40 min
- Lift the salt cap off in one piece, scrape the skin clean, then raise the oven to 250C (480F) and cook 12 to 20 minutes more, turning the tray, until the whole skin has puffed into fine blisters and rings hollow when tapped with a spoon. 20 min
- Rest 15 minutes, then chop skin side down through the crackling with one heavy cleaver stroke per cut into 3 cm squares, and scatter with flaky salt. 15 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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