Roast Pork Belly

Kerri has been saying for a while that she has been craving pork belly.  We did have it at friends last weekend, but still decided to cook it again today.

We looked back to last time we’d cooked it, which was more than a year ago!  The rub that we used had given it really a good flavour, so we did that again; it included bay leaves, garlic, salt, pepper and butter.  This time though, we used fresh bay leaves and used our nice granite mortar and pestle to grind it up, with the result that we ended up with a thick green paste rather than the version we had last time that had bits of crumpled dried bay leaf in it.

When it was cooking, I thought it smelt rather like snails.  It must have been the combination of butter, garlic and herbs.  It even tasted a little like snails, apart obviously from the fact that it was pork rather than snail!  Looking at our previous post, we cooked it for 30 minutes on 200C, then 30 minutes on 180C and then another 15 minutes on 160C.  It sounded a bit strange and I’m not sure where we got that recipe from, but we did it that way again.  The pork turned out tender and succulent, with a lovely flavour from the rub.

We also had some steamed cabbage and some roast potatoes.  The potatoes were a bit disappointing because they were a bit burnt but still not that crispy.  The strange recipe that we followed for the pork belly (i.e. we started the oven high and then slowly turned it down) might have had a bad effect on the potatoes because that’s the opposite to how we normally cook them.  It’s a shame that the potatoes are at the mercy of whatever else we are cooking.  Clearly we need two ovens.