Dongpo Pork

Pork is my favourite meat.  Whether it's minced in dumplings, cured into bacon, sausage or ham, griddled in chop form or slow roast till it melts in the mouth I think there's no meat more versatile.  It may not be as glamourous as a fillet steak but the variety of flavours and texture it offers are second to none.  The Chinese know this with them consuming something like 70% of the pork eaten on this planet and they were the first to domesticate this animal a good few thousand years ago, in fact if a chinaman says meat then what they mean is pork.

For melt in the mouth succulence the cut of choice for me has to be belly.  With slow cooking the layers of fat melt away, redering out and through the surrounding meat keeping it moist and breaking it down into its individual striations.  The aim always being to gain the succulence the fat gives you but cooking it out enough that the fat isn't offputting in its chewiness.  I've roast it on the bone, deboned it and rolled it around a stuffing of herbs and confitted it and all have been a success so when I read about Dongpo Pork on this website I knew it was for me.  3 1/2 hours of various cooking methods, all low and slow, had to leave an amazing final texture.

Last weekend was a really busy one - 2 gigs, one meal for the girlfriend's parents, a musical and a museum visit with my parents -  so this weekend gone was to be spent at home, the perfect opportunity to cook a time intensive dish.  I only got as far as the supermarket so it wasn't the best bit of pork belly around and looked a little less fatty than the one on the recipe page.  It was only £4 odd for just over a kilo though so I can't grumble too much.

As far as the recipe goes the main issues were getting a uniform browning on it during the frying stage, the serious hot oil spitting at that point and the finding something to steam a kilo lump of meat in.  The curved bit of pork belly just did not want to sit right in the frying pan and holding it down whilst it popped and spat has left a series of burns all over my hands.  To steam I used a big flat saucepan, creating to big boulders out of crushed up tin foil to rest the pork on above the water level.  Outside of these the recipe went very smoothly and once cooked and the sauce drizzled over I couldn't wait to get stuck in and find out if you really could pull the meat away with chopsticks.

 

The simple answer to this is, yes, you could.  I thought the photo at the top of the page summed the texture up perfectly.  The skin was so soft you could push chopsticks through it yet it still retained a nice, gelationous chew.  The fat was delicate and melt in the mouth, no unpleasant greasiness, and the meat was the most tender pig (well adult pig anyway - the 3 week old suckling piglet in Peru still had it beat) I've ever eaten.  I can't recommend it enough. 

Here it is in all its glory too, not quite the uniform colour of the original but still quite a nice looking centrepiece for a meal I think.

Comments

[schmoof]

I must try this - it looks amazing. How did you stop yourself from eating it all?

...Or did you?

[Kavita Favelle]

Wow, that looks FANTASTIC!

[aforkfulofspaghetti]

A fabulous centrepiece indeed! Looks absolutely scrummy...

[ros]

That's a superb action shot you have there with the chopsticks. That pork must have been beatifully tender.

I really like pork but, given the absolute love of the meat that so many people have, I get the impression I haven't had the best of it yet. I haven't had much success with pork belly but that's largely due to me having a dodgy cut the fist time I tried it, which made me rather ill.

I'll give this recipe a go, either this holiday or net half term.