Silverknife

Recipe time! Hooray hooray. And this is absolutely one of my favourites, as well as a drastically underappreciated dish. It's one of those recipes which turns a cheap, junk cut of meat into something brain-meltingly gorgeous, with very little effort. There's a little bit of an interesting philosophical twist in there as well, because if you can cook great things with the less popular cuts of an animal it's a great way of showing respect to that (once-)living thing and making its death worthwhile. Eating the best bits and throwing the rest away is the way of the destructive, unthinking corporate-encouraged lifestyle. Using the whole animal, nose to tail, is a pretty good way of breaking away from that. [stops channeling Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall].

As with most of my recipes, this is a "framework" set of instructions and ingredients (I hate following a fixed recipe every time). Once you've got the basic technique down you can play with the flavours to almost infinite variation.

Slow Simmered Pork Belly

Ingredients:

Pork belly - roughly a couple of strips per person. You'll soon learn how much is right depending how thick it's cut etc. As with most cooking, I'd recommend making more than enough the first time, and believe me, it's hard to have too much slow simmered pork belly. It can be skin on or skin off - the slow cooking process will reduce the toughest skin to tender gorgeousness, and it adds extra flavour and brings gelatin to help thicken the sauce. Some has bones, some doesn't - it doesn't matter which you get.
Soy sauce. Lots of supermarket soy sauces (and more expensive ones) are really really salty. The only one I use is Blue Dragon naturally brewed soy (and they're not paying me to say that). It's beautiful and sweet-tasting, with almost no saltiness.
Garlic, lots of
Some or all of: Star anise, 5-spice, Sezchuan peppercorns (roast them first either in an oven or a thick-bottomed pan then crush them), mixed spice.
Booze. In order of preference: sake (available in most supermarkets now with the cooking ingredients), shaohsing (very similar Taiwanese equivalent, I know it's in some stores where you can't get sake), sherry, cheap white wine.
Honey. Substitute: Golden syrup, or half and half white and brown sugar.
A bit of salt. If you can't find a non-salty soy sauce you might not need to add any.
Particularly optional: Chillies, fresh or dried or chilli oil.

The procedure is very simple indeed. First heat some oil in a pan, and brown the pork well. Make sure it's brown! The fat should be a bit crispy at the edges by the time it's done. Then sling in the garlic, stir around for about a minute more and start sloshing in the liquids. Precise quantities are really really unimportant - for two people I'd use about half a cup of soy, a good two or three tablespoons of the spices, maybe four or five tablespoons of booze, five or six tablespoons of the honey, syrup or sugar. It takes quite a lot of the sweet stuff, more than you'd expect. If you want it spicy, add chillies to taste.

Then add maybe a full cup or two of water, depending on how long you're going to cook it for. Try a spoonful of it once everything's in there, and make sure the mixture of sweet, savoury and spicy is just right - you can always adjust it at this point. The taste test is a drastically underused technique in most home kitchens - so many people just dump all the ingredients in according to a recipe and hope until the cooking's done, making things so much harder for themselves! Just remember that the liquid is going to reduce down a lot, so if the taste isn't very strong it will become more so - the balance is the important thing at this point.

Then you simmer it without a lid on - like the stock it shouldn't be boiling wildly, just a few bubbles rising to the surface. Actually, to be quite honest, belly pork can take quite a bit of bubbling, and if you find yourself short of time just turn it up and let it boil hard till it's reduced enough, it won't really suffer.

You want to give it at least one and a half hours, ideally two and a half of steady simmering, and when it's done you want to have cooked off most of the water so that the sauce has concentrated down to a thick glutinous consistency - the sugar thickens it once it's concentrated enough, and it almost becomes caramelised. This means you might have to add more water as you go along if it's getting too reduced too fast, just don't go crazy because you'll end up being there forever waiting for it to finish.

You'll need to keep a general eye on it, as it'll need a stir now and then to stop it sticking - half an hour is probably the longest you should leave it unattended, and for the last half hour not at all - it'll reduce faster and faster once there's less liquid. Once it's had the longest cooking time possible and the sauce is thick and rich, just dump it out onto some noodles or rice and eat! And be prepared to become addicted to pork belly for the rest of your life, of course.

A sidenote/bonus recipe, because this suddenly struck me yesterday and it's particularly relevent to this recipe. Chilli oil: Don't buy it. Just put 2 or 3 finely chopped fresh red chillies or 8-10 crushed dried ones in a saucepan with some good light oil (veg, sunflower, etc.), heat to just-bubbling, then allow to cool and bottle with the chilli bits still in it. Keeps forever.

Ooookay, that was way too easy.