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What Katie ate. Vietnamese salad with crispy pork belly


This is the second time we have made this recipe from 'What Katie Ate'. In the book it suggests using green papaya ... even Waitrose dont sell that, so I have amended the salad to be a kind of Asian slaw affair. i think it works pretty well.

We sat and ate it in the garden ... no builders and a bit of sun ... lovely.


Ingredients, serves 4 

1kg pork belly

Sea salt (I use Maldon)

Pepper
Olive Oil
5 spring onions
1 long, red chilli
1 large cucumber
1 bulb fennel
3 sticks celery
1 pink lady apple
large handful of shredded chinese leaf lettuce
large handful coriander leaves
large handful mint leaves
75gms roasted, unsalted peanuts
4 tbs rice wine vinegar
6 tsp fish sauce
4 tsp soy sauce
4 tbs lime juice
1 tbs finely grated palm sugar
1 Bird's Eye Chilli (small and strong)
Sesame seeds, to garnish

method

the pork


Pre-heat the oven to 240 degree celsius, on a fan oven. It sounds hot, but it will start the pork belly getting nice and crunchy.



Put the pork belly on a board, skin side up and make sure it's nice and dry. Grab a very sharp nice, and score the skin  in 1 - 1.5cm intervals so that the skin is in nice strips that will crispen up perfectly. Be careful NOT to cut down to the meat (..or even better just get your butcher to score the meat for you). 

Rub the skin with two and a half teaspoons of maldon salt, making sure you get into the slits. Turn the meat over, and rub the underside with a good glug of olive oil, a nice sprinkling of sea salt and some freshly ground pepper. The oil on the bottom helps make sure the bottom is nice and crunchy, as well as the top.

Put the pork in a roasting tin, skin side up and stick it in the oven for 30mins. After 30mins, the skin will be starting to crispen up nicely.
Turn the oven down to 180 degrees celsius and cook the pork for a further 2hrs. I checked on it ever once in a while, but honestly, I turned the pan round after an hour just to make sure the heat was as even as possible. After 2hrs, if the crackling hasn't hardened all over, turn the oven up to 200 degrees celsius and cook it for another 20mins, or until it's all lovely and crackling like. 

To check that it's properly crispened up, just tap it with the back of a spoon, and it should sounds solid and hard. Once you're happy the pork belly is cooked, take it out of the oven and put it onto a wire cooling wrack over a plate or dish and let it cool completely.


While the pork is cooking, or cooling, you'll have plenty of time to make the salad and dressing.



To make the salad, 

thinly slice the 2 - 3 spring onions. 

Take the seeds out of the red chilli and thinly slice it.
Chop the cucumber in half, length-ways, and scoop out the seeds in the centre, then dice up the cucumber.
then finely slice, mandoline or cube the apple, cabbage, fennel, celery and chinese leaf. 
Tear up a handful of the coriander leaves and the mint leaves.
Combined these all in a nice big bowl, along with the  roasted, unsalted peanuts.


To make the salad dressing, take the seeds out of the bird's eye chilli and finely dice it. Combine the chilli,  rice wine vinegar, fish sauce,  soy sauce,lime juice and  grated palm sugar in a container and mix it together.


Once the pork has nicely cooled, dice it into small cubed. You can use the score lines in the crackling as a guide for the first set of cuts.

Now mix as much of the dressing into the salad as you like. Add the pork on-top of the salad and mix again. Sprinkle with some sesame seeds, and a little bit of torn mint if you'd like, and thats it. 

Not tricky, but impressive. And with the green stuff and fruit, the crispy pork seems just that bit healthier... maybe!
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