Crispy Pork Belly Tricks No One Knows About | Perfect Crackling

In this roast pork belly recipe, learn how to achieve the lightest, crispest crackling possible on your pork belly. The best thing about this recipe is it only takes an hour to cook, it keeps the meat tender and succulent and gets great crackling.
Turn this cheap, tasty cut of meat into a weeknight meal option with this method!

For this recipe, I used:
500g, skin-on pork belly
6g salt
10-20ml vodka

RECIPES:

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This is a piece of pork belly and this recipe starts off in a strange way the first step is simmering the belly skin side down in a little water for 2 minutes then dunking it into cold water to cool off so cooking pork belly has always been something that’s bugged me I’ve

Never been 100% happy with the crackling sometimes it comes out great but other times I fear I’m going to break a tooth even though I cook it in the exact same way it’s a really inconsistent piece of meat to cook but look at this chich cherone I bought earlier this is essentially crackling

It’s just been cooked separately from the meat it’s so light and crisp there’s no risk of breaking a tooth here so I want to know if it’s possible to get something this light and crispy on top of a pork belly and I just want to roast

It in the oven I don’t want to have to deep fry it pour boiling hot oil over the skin or shallow fry it to achieve this pork skin and hot fat do not go well together and it needs to have tender meat and and cook in around an

Hour not much to ask right well I’m pleased to say I cracked it so I’ve combined all of the techniques that are proven to work into one effective method I’ve taken inspiration from acupuncture physics and a 15-year-old blog post that’s bu deep in the internet the best thing about

This method is there’s not much Hands-On work it takes less than an hour to cook and there’s no crazy high level of cooking skills needed in fact you don’t even need to use a knife I’ll be the first to admit that this doesn’t look the most appealing at this

Point of the recipe but stick with me and we’ll turn this into this next grab some toothpicks and pinch a few of them between your fingers then just start to jab the skin of the pork Pierce as close together as you can it’s best to work in a pattern rather than

Just random jabbing cuz it’s not easy to see where you’ve been you don’t need to go deep aim for around this far this seems like a bit of a faf but it doesn’t take long and it’s easier than scoring the the skin with a knife this brings me on to Pork Belly

Number two I’m going to prepare it using the most common methods of scoring salting and roasting so you can see the night and day difference that this traditional method makes compared to the new way I’m sharing with you today usually the skin is prepared by scoring

It with a sharp knife there are a few different ways straight lines a crisscross or a grid like this now there’s a couple of issues here the main one is you need a super sharp knife to be able to do this properly if your knife isn’t sharp enough then you’ll

Have to apply more pressure to break through the skin this makes it really easy to slice too deep into the meat this dries it out creating tough chewy patches not the tender melting your mouth experience you’re looking for I opted for the crisscross pattern and I

Made a couple of slashes a bit too deep so we can see what happens with this One from here I’m going to Salt both of the bellies all over I used around 6 G of salt for each and for those of you who like the details are down in the description I’m evenly seasoning all over the meat and skin and rub that salt

Into the skin a a little like a light exfoliation now the weirdest but possibly the most valuable part of this recipe is what I found buried deep on the internet someone known as origami crane found that rubbing a splash of vodka onto the skin of the pork gave incredible

Results so of course we have to find out if this works apparently you don’t need much just a splash and just rub it all over the surface of the skin that’s all the preparation done it really couldn’t be much easier now I like to leave it to

Brine for 12 hours in the fridge but you could roast this straight away I dry brine all of my meat covered in a large container you just want a lot of air around the pork lots of recipes recommend doing this uncovered in the fridge but I don’t like my apples

Tomatoes and whatever else is uncovered in here coated in essence of raw pork that doesn’t really float my boat some things have changed overnight there’s condensation on the container some water on the tray and both of the skins look a little drier these are all good signs one of the most overlooked and

Simple steps is doing something about this dip it’s here where the meat thins out this part of the skin is always the last to crackle so the best method is to level it out you can use a piece of onion a slice of potato a stick of

Celery if you haven’t got any of those and a bowl of foil will work just as well now with a sheet of foil just fold up the sides so they sit below the skin crimp the corners and you want to left with something like this where the skin

And the top layer of fat are the only things not covered this foil container is doing two things for us the first is going to protect the meat from the high temperatures of the oven and the second we’ll talk about a bit later next place

It onto a wire rack that’s on a roasting tray the other belly is just going onto the rack unleveled and uncovered as it is for a 500 G piece like this it’ll take around 45 minutes to be fully cooked at 170c 340f this is about as high as I like to

Go with my oven in this first stage of cooking any higher and a belly of this size and shape will cook too quick and risk becoming tough this temperature can be so much lower though the lower the more tender the end result will be but the longer the cooking time I want to

Show you the quick end of the scale today because it only takes around an hour in total including the Second Step that we’re about to get into this brings us affordable tasty cut of meat into the realm of week night meal options you want it to be any between 80

And 85 C at this first stage this took 42 minutes for me there’s no crackling so far but there’s this bubbling starting to happen and the belly has rendered a lot more fat than the traditional method speaking of this one is showing some signs of crackling around the edges the two deep slices

From scoring have opened up and the skin is starting to look like the hard teeth breaking crackling we all know too well once your oven’s up to 250 load the pork back in and watch that crackling pop rotate the tray a couple of times times during the process and after 10 to

15 minutes you will have incredible crackling now for possibly the hardest part of the whole recipe leaving it to rest for at least 20 minutes the jabbing has given us this rather than this the vodka has helped the skin go from this to this the leveling out has given us

This instead of this this method has worked so well on so many levels a lot of the fat has rendered out leaving us with this light crisp cracking there’s no worries about breaking a tooth contrast this to the other belly there’s still that thick layer of unrendered fat and the crackling just

Hasn’t puffed it would have got there with another 5 maybe 10 minutes of hard roasting but by that point the meat would just be dry and disappointing making pork belly look good on a plate is sometimes easier said than done there are literally hundreds of ways it could be presented so check

Out this video next for loads of tips on plating food and how you can use this skill to stay enthusiastic about home cooking