Crispy Pork Belly | Perfect Light Crackling

This pork belly recipe starts off in an 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 has 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 really inconsistent piece of meat to cook. But look at this chicharron I bought earlier, this is essentially crackling, its just been cooked separately from the meat.

Its so light and crisp, theres no risk of breaking a tooth here, at all!

So I want to know if its 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 super hot oil over the skin or shallow fry in a pan to achieve this.

Pork skin and hot fat, do not go well together! Oh yeah and it needs to have tender meat and cook in around an hour.

Not much to ask right?

The Method

So, I’ve combined all of the techniques that are proven to work into 1 effective method. I’ve taken inspiration from acupuncture, physics and a 15 year old blog post thats buried deep in the internet.

The best thing about this method is that theres not much hands on work, it takes less than an hour to cook and theres no crazy high level of cooking skills needed, in fact you don’t even need a to use a knife.

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 random jabbing because 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 faff but it doesn’t take long and its easier than scoring the skin with a knife.

The Comparison

This brings me onto pork belly number 2. Im 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, criss cross, or a grid like this.

Now there’s some 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 of meat, not the tender melt in your mouth experience your looking for.

I opted for the criss cross pattern and i made a couple of slashes a bit too deep so we can see what happens with this one.

Dry Brining and Curing The Skin

From here I’m going to salt both the bellies all over, I used around 6 grams of salt for each.

Evenly season the salt all over the meat and the skin, and rub the salt into the skin 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 know as “Origamicrane” did an extensive test on 10 different pieces of pork belly.

They found that rubbing a splash of vodka on 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 over the surface of the skin. Thats all the preparation done, it really couldn’t be much easier.

Now I like to leave it to brine overnight in the fridge, but you could roast this straight away.

I like dry brine all my meat covered in a large container, you just want a lot of air around the pork, there are many ways you could achieve this. Lots of recipes recommend doing this uncovered in there fridge,

but this is an easy way to make you and your family sick, fridges have fans, raw meat has plenty of bacteria. You can fill in the blanks.

Some things have changed overnight, theres condensation of the container, some water on the tray and both the skins look a little drier. These are all good signs.

Preparing The Pork For Roasting

One of the most overlooked and simple steps when cooking pork belly is doing something about this dip. Here where the meat thins out, this part of the skin is always the last to crackle, it sits lower and doesn’t get hit with the same intensity of heat in the oven.

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 then a ball of foil will work just as well.

Now with the sheet of foil just fold up the sides so they sit below the skin. Crimp the corners and you want be 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 2 things for us, the first its going to protect the meat from the high temperatures of the oven and the 2nd we’ll talk about a bit later.

Roasting The Pork Bellies

Next place it on a wire rack thats over a roasting tray. The other belly it’s just going on the rack unlevelled and uncovered as it is.

For a 500g 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 the temperature of my oven in this 1st 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 2nd step that we’re about to get into.

This brings this affordable, tasty cut of meat into the realm of weeknight meal options.

You want it to be any where between 80 and 85 c at this stage, this took 42 minutes for me. Theres no crackling so far but there is this bubbling starting to happen and this 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 2 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.

Getting The BEST Crackling

Once your ovens upto 250c load the pork back in and watch that crackling pop. Rotate the tray a couple of times during the process and after 10 to 15 minutes you will have incredible crackling.

Now for the hardest part of the whole recipe…. Leaving it to rest for at least 20 minutes.

This method has worked so well on so many levels, a lot of the fat has rendered out leaving us with this light, crisp crackling, and theres no worries about breaking a tooth!

Contrast to the other belly, theres still this thick layer of unrendered fat and the crackling just hasn’t puffed. It would’ve got there with another 5 or 10 minutes of hard roasting but by that point the meat would be dry and disappointing.