Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with the caramel pork belly. It’s such a trendy ingredient, you see that in like every show now and that I figured it’s about time I did something with it. I found a beautiful piece of pork belly in Japan Town San Francisco. It’s about 10-ounce piece of butcher pork and if you're saying, “It looks like bacon” that same cut, it’s pork belly is bacon that’s cured and smoked.
So, I'm going to take a piece of heavy duty aluminum foil. I want to put on a little bit of green onions, place my pork down the fatty or side down. I’m going to give it a little bit of salt to the meatier side. They’re not too much. The caramel sauce is fairly salty so just a little sprinkle salt, some more green onions. And then I'm going to wrap this up in a couple layers of aluminum foil. I want to press it nice and firm and must the air out of there.
All right, there's one piece wrap in another piece. And what we're going to do is we're going to put it in a loaf pan with the same side up. And we're going to roast this really slowly in a very, very, very slow oven. So, degrees and we're going to set our timer for five and a half hours. And after five and a half hours, you're going to turn off the oven and just leave the pork in there to cool, so it's going to stand there another couple hours. And then you're going to refrigerate it overnight which is really crucial. It’s got to be completely chilled before you slice it.
I want to pull off those green onions and you see because we cooked it so slowly, it really didn’t loose much volume. I want to cut in eight pieces and on medium heat in a sauté pan, I want to crisp about all six sides which takes a little while. But you know what, you’ve already wait to—so relax, enjoy the ride.
So, while that’s crispy enough, I’m going to get my caramel sauce ready which is really simple. It’s kind of a take on the—caramel chicken sauce, brown sugar, rice vinegar, fish sauce. You knew that was cumin, and a little dash of soy sauce and then I'm going to grate it well at two ounce, piece of ginger, squeeze it to get that beautiful ginger juice and that little piece of ginger is bugging me so let me find that and get rid of it. And you see that pork how beautifully it’s browning. I want to get it all beautifully crispy and brown but least of that. And you're not going to make this after listening to that.
All right, for my aroma, let's get some slice of garlic, some green onions and some dried red hot, firy hot red chilies. All right, once my pork is brown, I'm going to soak up some of the oil and I realized in some cultures I would be promptly arrested for doing that but that’s okay. I’m going to pull up most of the fat. I’m going to put in one tablespoon of that glaze. I may turn to heat up to medium high and I just want to caramelize the edges of that pork first before I add the rest of the sauce, so just keep turning that I recommend a flexuously small wooden spoon for this, works very nicely.
And you see there as soon as it’s glazed on all sides and that sugar has caramelized and it’s almost getting from dark brown border line blackish, that is perfect. I’m going to make a little well in the middle. I’m going to add my aromatic vegetables, the garlic, the green onions and the chilies and we’re going to just give that about a minute sauté and then we're going to add the rest of the ingredients which is very basic. We’re going to add a little bit of water and we're going to add the rest of our glaze, the rest of our caramel sauce and we’re just going to simmer that until the sauce thickens a little bit.
Remember the pork’s cooked, the pork is way cooked, so what we’re doing really, the pork is flavoring the sauce, the sauce is absorbing all the flavors from the pork and as soon as that sauce thickens up like that our deliciously deck it in pork belly is done. I'd you taste it just easily but you can't because the sauce is very intense. It’s salty sweet tangy spicy but the reason for that is I'm going to serve this on some fairly blond brown rice that I cooked this some —so when you eat the rich pork and you break it apart and eat it with that rice and—the intense sauce really works perfectly together.
This is one of the most delicious things I’ve eaten in months and I hope you try it. Get a small piece of pork belly, you don’t need much, a little bit goes a long way and give that a try. All the ingredients are on the site and as always, enjoy.
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