Siu Yuk

Roast pork belly where the skin blisters into hard bubbles, which takes a day of drying and then fifteen fierce minutes.

Pork. Not vegetarian — contains pork.

Ingredients

• 1.5 kg pork belly in one piece, skin on and unscored
• 2 tablespoons coarse salt, for the skin
• 2 tablespoons rice vinegar
• 1 tablespoon salt, for the meat
• 2 teaspoons five spice
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground white pepper
• 500 g coarse salt, for the crust

Method

1. THE SKIN IS PRICKED UNTIL IT STOPS TAKING THE NEEDLE, and then pricked more. Hundreds of holes, close together, through the skin but NOT into the fat beneath. Each hole lets a jet of steam out; where there is no hole the skin stays leather. A piece pricked twenty times comes out blistered in twenty places and chewy everywhere else, and nothing in the oven repairs it afterwards.
2. AND IT MUST BE DRY BEFORE IT GOES NEAR HEAT. Uncovered in the fridge overnight at minimum, a full day better. Wet skin steams, and steamed skin cannot blister.
3. A kettle boiled and poured over the skin only, with the belly on a rack in the sink. The skin tightens and turns pale. Patted bone dry.
4. Turned over. The MEAT side scored 1 cm deep in a crosshatch -- never the skin -- and the meat salt, five spice, sugar and white pepper rubbed into those cuts.
5. Turned back. The skin pricked now, all over, with a clean metal skewer. This is ten minutes of work and the dish turns on it.
6. The skin brushed with the rice vinegar and the 2 tablespoons of coarse salt rubbed over it.
7. Onto a rack over a tray, meat side down, into the fridge UNCOVERED overnight.
8. Next day the salt wiped off and the skin patted dry again. Oven to 160C.
9. The belly sat in a foil tray with the foil walled up around the sides to the height of the skin, and the 500 g of coarse salt packed over the skin in an even layer to the edges. The crust holds the skin flat and pulls the last water out while the meat cooks gently underneath.
10. 90 minutes at 160C.
11. Out, the salt crust lifted off in one piece and every grain brushed away. The skin will look pale, dry and unpromising at this stage.
12. Oven to its maximum, 240C or above, grill element on if there is one. Back in, high up, 15 to 25 minutes.
13. WATCHED THE WHOLE TIME. The skin goes from flat to bubbling across the piece in about ninety seconds, and from bubbling to burnt not long after. Turn the tray if it is blistering unevenly.
14. Rested 15 minutes, then cut skin side up with a heavy cleaver, one decisive stroke per cut, into 2 cm squares. A sawing cut shatters the skin and pushes it off the meat.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under China · All recipes