Join us! Required fields are marked *, Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress, Reverse Seared Ribeye Steak (How To Cook To Perfection), Smoked Boston Butt For Pulled Pork on the Mini WSM. Line the bottom of a roasting tray with baking paper and add the pork belly, fat side down. Pork belly contains generous layers of fat running alongside the meat, giving it unrivalled flavour and succulence. You can use the entire pork belly if you want to, but if you want your finished bacon to look like the one you get in stores, here’s what to do: The best cut is the thickest part of the belly, so you can cut off the two edges where the meat becomes thinner. Then sit back and admire your work. You can also go by color– when it gets to the right shade of dark brown, you can proceed to the next step. Place the pork belly fat side down on a tray and rub the meat with five spice, salt and pepper. by Aussie Meat November 23, 2019. Refrigerate the cured pork belly … More meat also means there’s more room to trim your cuts into visually appealing masterpieces that will make some jaws drop at the next BBQ. Now we really start to get these pork belly burnt ends sweet and tender. The fresh meat … Rub the top with oil, then generously season the meat with salt and pepper. Pork belly is as unctuous a cut of meat as you can get, and it’s popular in cuisines the world over. Having done that, here are the cuts coming from the belly of your pig: There’s some great meat in the loin as well. 1kg Australian pork belly ... With a small sharp knife, deeply score the rind at 1cm intervals, being careful to not cut into the meat. Bacon, on the other hand, can be made of different types of meat. Doing the job yourself means you get exactly what you want. Either put the rack of ribs to one side, or cut them up into individual ribs at this stage. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Thinly sliced pork or beef is the key ingredient in many popular Japanese recipes. Here’s a guide on how to butcher a whole pig from the guys at Bon Apetit. Pork with crackling. Unfortunately, because it has such a bitter taste, it’s one of the few parts of a pig you can’t use. Is salt pork the same as pork belly? This is effectively pork suet. To crisp the skin, score it and then sear or broil at the end. The 4 Primals are: the Shoulder, the Loin, the Belly, and the Ham. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Now simply divide up your belly as you like. The connective tissue in the meat needs time to break down slowly, allowing the fat to render out and the meat to become fork-tender. You can really see now that mine is anything but rectangular! These are larger cuts, which can then be divided into smaller, more manageable cuts. The belly is another great primal cut. Once you’ve removed it, set it to one side (I usually keep an ‘offcuts’ plate or bowl handy when I’m portioning or butchering meats). Mine weighed almost exactly 1.6kg at this point, so I divided it evenly into four ~400g pieces. You should be able to feel roughly where the ribs end, so extend your cut beneath them as close as possible to this level. Here’s a list of the cuts that come out of the shoulder. or Not To Wrap? Go to your local butcher or retailer and order fresh, skin-on, center-cut pork belly—the leaner the better. It is one long cut of meat with plenty of fat worked into the meat, which is why it is prized for curing and turning into bacon or pancetta. Pork belly is such a wonderful and versatile cut, and so under-rated here in the UK. Let it cook for about 4 hours or until it reaches 160°F. As a result I tend to buy it most-of-a-belly at a time! © 2011-2020. Bag your butchered ribs up, label them, and freeze them for another day (they’re great done on the BBQ with a jerk marinade!). In addition to seasoning the meat, the … Typically, recipes call for around 2 hrs at 180C/160C fan/gas 4, then a further 30 mins or so at 200C/180C fan/gas 6. Most of my bacon making is with belly, so we get through quite a lot of it. Score the fat on top of the belly with a sharp knife, being sure not to cut into the meat. The piece has been rotated 180 degrees from where it was in the previous photograph so that the ribs are now bottom right. The total curing time would normally be 5 days for belly pork, but these pieces are thicker than usual, so I may decide to let them go a day longer, depending on the texture and appearance at the 5 day mark. Now gently slice beneath the strap-like muscle we identified earlier, where it lies over the ends of the ribs, and peel it back,  You’ll find the ends of the ribs and the strips of cartilage which link them together. Place in refrigerator, uncovered, overnight. All rights reserved (except as specifically indicated). From pork cutlets, to the femur bone (great for pork broth! 3. Although there is not much meat on this cut, there’s still some great flavor, including everyone’s favorite: bacon. Here’s another great butchery video from Bon Appétit magazine, this time focusing on how to butcher a pig. 2. Ingredients: 6garlic cloves, roughly chopped; 40 g(1½ oz/⅓ cup) salt Change ). 6. You can also ask your butcher to score it for you. Pork Belly Hung Out To Dry To Make Preserved Meat Pictures of pork belly being hung from a Jurong HDB window rack have been circulating on social media. A small butcher shop should be more customer service oriented and would apologise for forgetting to remove the skin. Their cut is pretty thick, which we like. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Basic Butchery – how to butcher & portion a pork belly, Smoking and Curing (including DIY Cold Smoker Build), bacon-in-a-bag ‘dry’ cure method can be found here. Bring a pot of water to boil. ( Log Out /  The belly can also be cut into smaller pieces and prepared in the same manner. Place the cooled pork belly between two sheet pans (with cans or some weight on top) to compress the meat. Therefore, bacon is processed meat while pork belly is raw meat. This couldn’t be simpler – just feel for the gap between each pair of ribs and slice down the centre parallel to them, your knife, if it’s nice and sharp, should cut straight through the connecting cartilage. This is my starting point – just under 2kg piece of pork belly . I usually get my pork belly from a Korean butcher shop. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! the 4 Primal Cuts. 2. My belly portions were for curing, so I prepared a maple syrup cure made up of 100g of supracure and 90g of pure maple syrup, applied about half to all the bellies, and then bagged them together in the fridge. Remove the rind from the sections that will be used for Cured Bacon, and the Italian Porchetta Roast. What knives are you using? It’s actually sitting ‘upside down’ in terms of how it was on the pig – the top as we look at that photo is the part closest to the middle of the pig’s body, the rib side is towards the back. How to cook pork belly. Start by removing the layer of fat on the inside of the belly piece, if there’s one there. Pork cuts, value added & free farmed. The secret to cooking belly pork is the combination of a gentle heat to tenderise the meat and short, high temperature blasts to crisp up the skin on the outside. Rather, it is the flesh that runs on the underside (the belly) of the pig and surrounds the stomach. The final out of the Four Primal Cuts, the ham includes a wide range of tastes and textures. Preserving pork and quite common around the world but this particular Chinese product is essentially a fattier cousin of the more familiar ‘Jerky‘. 3. This includes the head. You can trim away any strips of cartilage that area easy to identify – you can see this top left. Allow the pork to cool slightly, then remove the fat. The secret to cooking pork belly is the combination of a gentle heat to tenderise the meat and short, high temperature blasts to crisp up the skin on the outside. 5 pounds of belly will fit into one pan but for 10 pounds use two pans.Sprinkle over some brown sugar (about a half cup per pan), cut a stick of butter per pan into tablespoon chunks and add those to the pan. I’ll apply the second half after 48 hours and re-arrange the bellies so they’re skin-side together for the second half of the curing process. ), therefore we won’t go into how to cut every single one of them. Pat the pork belly all over with kitchen paper to dry the surface, then rub with olive oil and season generously all over with salt and black pepper. I’ll keep you posted! You can see the effect of the trimming in this photograph – the piece has been rotated again so the rib-side is now away from us. Place the belly carefully in the marinade mix, which should come up to the sides of the meat, but not touch the skin. £4.39kg This flat cut pork belly is a versatile cut with the creamy layering of fat offering rich succulence, and is left unrolled by our Master Butcher as neat slab of pork with the bone in. That bit is genuinely wastage, incidentally, so chuck it away if you want! Now let’s turn our attention back to the pork belly itself. Remove the racks from the smoker and put the pork chunks in a foil pan. Weigh each piece, and vacuum-seal in heavy freezer bags. Now you can get a better look at the anatomy of your piece of meat. Pork belly performs quite well when cooked low and slow. As we get closer to the abdominal midline, the proportion of fat to muscle increases, so I trimmed the piece to rectangular, discarding the part which is most top-left in this photograph. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Cooking Pork Belly. Bring the world to your kitchen with SBS Food. Please contact the author with any requests to use the content, at kate@countryskillsblog.com. Start by removing the layer of fat on the inside of the belly piece, if there’s one there. Add the ginger, scallion, and blanch the pork belly pieces over medium heat for about 5 minutes. It is salted for about a week. Preheat oven to 350f, and line a roasting pan with foil (for easy cleanup). On the right side of the belly is a band of smooth muscle. First grade fresh NZ pork. Pork tenderloin, sure. Watch the video below for some great tips on butchering and trimming pork. After the brining process is over, the bacon is dried and at times smoked. Read more DIY Cold Smoker & Home-Curing posts >>, Read more from the Country Skills blog >>. 2. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Cut the pork belly into slices as thick as you like and then fry, roast, broil, or grill the meat until it's completely cooked. One thing you have to take care of before cutting into the meat, is removing the gland from the flank section. In it we see butcher Bryan Mayer tackling a side of pork that’s been hung for seven days, first breaking it down into the five main cuts – shoulder, belly, loin, ham and head – and then down further into various chops, steaks, bacon, etc. As it’s laid out in the photo here, the ribs are on the left, you can see the flap of diaphragm meat lying above them. Add your trimmings to the ‘offcuts’ bowl. For Japanese recipes that include pork or beef, the majority will list “thinly sliced meat” on the ingredients list. ), here are the cuts you can expect to find in a pork ham: As mentioned before, almost nothing on a pig has to go to waste. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. This process further dries the rind and aids the crackling process. Place the pork belly on your prepared baking rack with the skin-side facing up. ( Log Out /  There are so many different cuts that come out of a pig (over 30! Bag your ribs and your offcuts – these will make fantastic quite fatty minced pork for adding to any minced-meat dish that requires extra juiciness and succulence, or for sausages. It’s uncured, and often sold in big slabs, making its preparations much different from sliced streaky bacon. NOTE: The time may vary, as with any low and slow cook, … Many of them are roasts, there’s a lot of lean meat in there for you to enjoy. Pork belly skin is very tough so you’ll need a very sharp knife. Cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours. We are a Secret community of grilling, meat smoking, barbecuing pitmasters from all across the nation. Find your pork belly, chops pork shoulders, pork loins, leg roasts & even offal at the Aussie Butcher. Here’s how to slice meat thinly for delicious Japanese dishes like Sukiyaki, Okonomiyaki, and Gyudon! I did the same over the weekend, but left the ribs as a full rack. Thanks! Start by trimming the pork belly. For example, slice the pork belly into 1/4 in (0.6 cm) slices and then fry for 7 to 8 minutes to get crispy bacon. Roast pork belly has the *best* crackling. 5. 4. Even though many people are reluctant to use it (it does have a face, after all) there are some great meals in the head and you shouldn’t underestimate its value: Hopefully you got a few pointers on how to butcher a whole pig! Take a long, thin bladed, sharp knife and first cut beneath the ribs, as close as possible to them to reduce wastage. Place the pork belly in the smoker for three hours. My pork belly halves cooked for 4.5 hours at which point they were the color I wanted and about 163 to 168°F in the center. Smoke the meat at a slow heat, just enough heat to make the sawdust smoke. How To Roast A Whole Piglet (Spit Roasted Lechon), Homemade Bacon From Pork Belly (Full Guide). This is my starting point – just under 2kg piece of pork belly . To break down the connective tissue in the meat, pork belly is best slow-cooked for a tender chew and to render the fat silky-soft. 3-2-1 Method For Smoking Ribs: Secret Conversation Betw... Homemade Soppressata Salami – Italian Cured Dry Sausage, How to Make Capicola: The Salt Box Method, Smoked Suckling Pig On Ole Hickory Smoker, How To Butcher a Cow (Every Cut of Beef Explained). Well suited to marinating or slow roasting, the impressive flavour of the pork belly reflects the rich diets of our outdoor reared hogs. These are larger cuts, which can then be divided into smaller, more manageable cuts. A large piece like this would be fantastic roasted slowly whole, too, perhaps with chinese spices, for a special meal for a big gathering! Because I’m planning to prepare the belly as streaky bacon, this will give me more manageable, even chunks. A lot of muscle equals a lot of meat, and on a pig this does not come at the cost of fat and flavor. You can easily find thinly sliced pork belly in Korean markets. Roast pork belly. Learn how your comment data is processed. Your butcher will probably offer to prepare your belly for you, removing the ribs and trimming it to your preference, but you never quite seem to get exactly what you were after, somehow! Place the pork belly on the smoker grate fat side up. of pork belly, there are times when they have them cut into strips, usually 4 or 5 to a package, and then all you have to do is cube them up. We have recipes and dinner ideas from more than 100 cuisines, plus how to articles, step-by-step video tutorials and blogs. Cover dish with foil. It would be great to get some maple smoke into some of them – but that’ll depend on the weather. An Introduction to Preserved Pork Belly Commercially made Preserved Pork Belly. The thickness varies from paper thin (or shaved) slices to about 1/4 to 1/2-inch thick ones. Every single part of a pig is delicious! Whether you are a butcher, you raise our own animals, or just got a great deal at the local meat market, here’s how to butcher a whole pig step by step. How To Butcher A Whole Pig (Every Pork Cut Explained) When you have your halved pig in front of you, you can immediately separate it into the 4 major sections, a.k.a. You can either use a pork belly without skin or get a skin on belly and remove the skin yourself. Preheat an oven to 220ºC/gas mark 7. How to prepare Marinated Pork Belly? You shouldn’t need your knife for this, it should just pull away if you work gently beneath it with your fingers, leaving a clean muscle surface beneath. The ends of the ribs lie almost exactly where the visible edge of this muscle joins the diaphragm. Pork belly is best roasted in the … Baked pork chops, definitely. There are multiple ways to cook Pork Belly if you aren’t going to use it to make homemade bacon. You shouldn’t need your knife for this, it should just pull away if you work gently beneath it with your fingers, leaving a clean muscle surface beneath. Steaks, butts, bacon, ham and ribs. Some people consider the Head a 5th primal, if your pig comes with one. When Smoking Ribs… To Wrap? Pork belly is simply a cut of meat that comes from the hog’s belly. ... Also, if you're on the fence about buying 8-10 lbs. When you have your halved pig in front of you, you can immediately separate it into the 4 major sections, a.k.a. Pork belly is the uber-fatty and rich portion of meat cut from the belly of the pig. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. have fun! But a roast pork with the crunchy rind attached felt... difficult. So, if you fancy serving up a treat for the family, here’s a little insight into how to cook pork belly. Slice and heat the pork belly. Cut the remaining pork belly in three sections of desired weight. Bake at 300° F until tender, about 4 hours for a 3-pound piece. There are a lot of great cuts in the shoulder! After five minutes, clean the pork under running water and keep … Gently slice around these and then back underneath. ( Log Out /  the 4 Primal Cuts. The process of butchering it to remove the ribs and prepare it for curing or roasting is quite simple, and worth learning, since it means you’ll end up with precisely the piece of meat you want for the task at hand, and a couple of little bonus items, too! For some great tips on butchering and trimming pork sold in big slabs, its. ) salt pork with crackling how to butcher pork belly from Bon Appétit magazine, this will give me more cuts. Sharp knife, being sure not to cut every single one of them – but that ’ ll need very! Lie almost exactly 1.6kg at this stage a skin on belly and remove the skin, score it you! Varies from paper thin ( or shaved ) slices to about 1/4 to thick! And would apologise for forgetting to remove the skin the Italian Porchetta roast a of... A slow heat, just enough heat to make the sawdust smoke details below or click an icon to in. Different cuts that come Out of the pig and surrounds the stomach you... Without skin or get a better look at the anatomy of your piece of meat cut from smoker. Typically, recipes call for around 2 hours at 180C/ fan 160C, then a further 30 mins or at... Be used for the Crispy Asian pork belly performs quite well when cooked low and slow to follow your and! Across the nation that area easy to identify – you can really see that... You, you are commenting using your Twitter account, roughly chopped ; 40 (... The bottom of a roasting tray with baking paper and add the ginger scallion. Heavy freezer bags cans or some weight on top of the belly, so we get through quite a of. Get through quite a lot of it tastes and textures to articles step-by-step... Back to the pork belly performs quite well when cooked low and slow for 2. 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Or click an icon to Log in: you are commenting using your Facebook account pans ( with cans some! Blanch the pork belly is the key ingredient in many popular Japanese recipes without skin or get a look... A tray and rub how to butcher pork belly top with oil, then a further mins... ~400G pieces roast pork with the crunchy rind attached felt... difficult … how to butcher pork belly! Of tastes and textures even chunks in cuisines the world to your kitchen with SBS.! The fridge for 1 hour, or cut them up into individual ribs at this stage the rind on the! Ll need a very sharp knife, being sure not to cut every single of. Quite well when cooked low and slow pig from the sections that will be used for Cured,! Are so many different cuts that come Out of the bacon-in-a-bag ‘ dry ’ method. Cut from the smoker for three hours and Gyudon guys at Bon Apetit at kate countryskillsblog.com. As unctuous a cut of meat as you like leaner the better to enjoy knife, sure! On a tray and rub the meat, is removing the layer of on! Of our outdoor reared hogs incidentally, so chuck it away if you aren ’ going... Desired weight so you ’ ll depend on the fence about buying 8-10.! As specifically indicated ) or get a skin on belly and remove this as a i... Right shade of dark brown, you are commenting using your Facebook account pork. Pig ( over 30 is very tough so you ’ ll need a very how to butcher pork belly knife, being sure to. The anatomy of your piece of pork belly on your prepared baking with... Order fresh, skin-on, center-cut pork belly—the leaner the better ( guide... Front of you, you can get a skin on belly and remove the and. Japanese recipes that include pork or beef is the flesh that runs on the ingredients list a! Can trim away any strips of cartilage that area easy to join up with the cut beneath remove!, can be found here. ) primal cuts, which we like 180C/ fan 160C, a! ’ cure method can be found here. ) of smooth muscle ’ need... Up your belly as you can really see now that mine is anything rectangular. Roasting pan with foil ( for easy cleanup ) 5 minutes obvious,! But that ’ ll depend on the weather order fresh, skin-on center-cut!