Recipe: Taiwanese Braised Pork Belly 爌肉

I know in my previous blog post that I had promised to put up posts about Norwegian birthday cake and Norwegian full spread breakfast, but I'm breaking my promise.

Edit: I finally got around to remaking the recipe over at Paul's apartment and we managed to find the right cut of pork at West Side Market on 110th, so here's the updated version with extra photos! Yes! I've still included one picture from my attempt in Elmira because it shows a more wholesome idea of the finished product, but everything else is new and improved!

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Ingredients

• 2 lbs. of pork belly, skin on, cut into 1/2 lb pieces

• 1 stick of old ginger

• 2 buds of dried star anise

• 5-10 sprigs of spring onion, root end trimmed off

• As much soy sauce and water in a 1:1 ratio needed to cover the meat

• 1 Tbsp. brown sugar

For this recipe you will need a large pot, preferably a dutch oven or any earthenware cooking pot. You can leave the skin on the ginger if you want, just make sure you scrub the bristles off. Now, it's going to get REALLY complicated, and you're going to have to follow my orders very closely, okay?

Heat up the pot, throw in a bit of oil, sear the pork on all sides. Once the meat is colored on all sides, remove it from the pot to let it cool a bit, and drain the pot of extra oils. When the meat has cooled down, put it back in the pot and throw all the other ingredients in there with it. Depending on the pot, then the liquid should cover the meat. If not just add more equal amounts of water and soy sauce in there.

That's it. You let the pork simmer for about 2 hours, remove the ginger and the star anise, and then it's ready to be served with rice. Have leftovers? Throw the entire pot in the fridge, and the fat from the pork will congeal with the cold, sealing all the flavors in; the next time you heat it up, it just tastes even better. 

When you're eating it, don't ignore the spring onions, either. The spiciness will have cooked out through the long hours of stewing, and the texture will become melt-in-your-mouth(ing-ly?) delicious.

If you want an extra snack, pop a few peeled hard-boiled eggs in there to stew with the pork until the color of the egg white has become a nice brown. Mmm-mm good.

Happy eating, folks!