Crackling Pork Belly (Siew Yoke)
Growing up, every Chinese New Year (and some other random family functions) my aunt would always bring huge slab of crackling pork belly, otherwise fondly known as siew yoke or sio bak. It was a crowd favourite and I remember one time I was late to the party (we were busy baking bread for everyone) to find that it was all gone by the time I reached! Much sadness. So last Christmas I decided to ask her for the recipe and kept it in my phone since. I’ve not had the chance to try it until I saw a lone slab of pork belly sitting amongst the hams in the supermarket and I made a beeline for it.
Since I couldn’t imagine eating 1kg of pork belly, I halved it and used the rest for charsiew.
Recipe
Ingredients
Five spice powder
Salt
1 clove of garlic
Sand ginger (optional)
Method
Turn the meat skin side down. Slice the garlic and use the tip of your knife to slit it and poke the garlic slices into the meat. Poke garlic at intervals into the meat. Use the sharp end of the knife to make a small hole and the slice of garlic should fit in nicely.
Once you’re done with the garlic, rub five spice powder and sand ginger (optional) on the meat side. Be sure not to get any on the skin. The skin has to be really dry. I don’t have measurements because I just eyeballed this and don’t be scared to use the five spice powder liberally. I don’t think it could ever be too much really.
Turn the pork belly around (so that the skin side is up) and dab skin dry. Put into fridge overnight or 3-4 hours uncovered. The main goal is to keep the skin really dry so we can get that crackling.
Before roasting, take the pork belly out of the fridge and create one big slab of salt on top of it. Be very generous with the salt. Roast at 180 degrees for one hour.
Take off the salt crust and roast again at 240 degrees for another hour. I had a smaller cut of meat so on the second roast, you want to check on it every 5-10 minutes. If it starts to burn you can just pull it out of the oven before the hour is up.
Enjoy!
