Smoked Pork Belly On The Weber Kettle For A Delicious Banh Mi Sandwich

Smoked pork belly is fantastic in so many things, but especially in a smoked pork belly banh mi. Now, if you've never had a banh mi, a banh mi is a Vietnamese sandwich. It's just super, super refreshing. There's some great ingredients to it. And pork belly is a common one that I've had. There's a lot of different ones. There's other pork banh mis, there's tofu banh mis, there's all kinds of different ones. We're gonna be smoking up our pork belly, but first we need to get it marinated, and I wanna marinate it overnight. Now, our marinade starts with 10 ounces of soy sauce, eight ounces of cranberry juice. I know some of these are not traditional ingredients for a marinade like this, but I like these and it's gonna be terrific. Next up is about a quarter cup of honey, half a teaspoon of ground black pepper, half a teaspoon of smoked paprika, and half a teaspoon of Chinese five spice. And we're gonna mix this up. I'm gonna start slow because that honey is in there and it needs to break down and blend in. You can tell if the honey is broken down by just scraping the bottom, lifting it up, you can see we had a little there. Just keep working it. If there's a little that's stubborn, that's okay. We just don't want one huge glob of honey in here. That's looking pretty good. All right, let's get our pork belly out here. Now, I've got four pounds of pork belly here conveniently pre-cut into one pound sections. Now, if you don't know what pork belly is, it is the basis of bacon. You look at the profile here along the side, you can see that familiar bacon look. To make bacon, you go through a curing process. We're not doing that today. This is just straight up pork belly. Now, what I wanna do is I wanna break each of these down into three sections. That's gonna give a little more surface area over the pork belly with our marinade and when we get it out on the grill for smoking. So basically, I'm just gonna kinda eyeball this into three sections. And this pork belly has had the skin removed. Sometimes it'll come with the skin and if you want to, you could leave that and do a crispy pork belly, but this is not gonna be that recipe. We're gonna be smoking this. All right, let's get this in our marinade. I have my marinade container here and I'm just gonna get my pork belly pieces in and I wanna go fat side down first because I am gonna rotate these after about eight hours. I want the meat down in the marinade when we're done and ready to start smoking. We're gonna have to kinda cram everybody in here, but we'll make it work. We get our marinade in, just kinda squish everybody around here to get some of that marinade on the top at first. It's not enough to submerge all of them and that's why I said we're gonna turn these after about eight hours. All right, I'm gonna cover this. It's going in the refrigerator overnight and tomorrow, I'll see you out at the grill. All right, the Weber kettle is up to temp. My target today is 250. Now, because of the way the kettle is set up, I've had the vent over the coals as it's heating up and the lid thermometer over the location of the food at the same time, just to give me a guide. I'm not running an ambient temperature probe today and the vent will be over the food once I get it on there, so we're just getting a gauge and I'll adjust the vents as I need to. So let's go ahead and get the food on and I wanna show you something new on here. This is the Hunsaker Smokers super heavy-duty stainless steel grate. The stainless steel on this is, I believe, over a quarter-inch thick. It is mega heavy-duty. It has two flip-up wings so you can access charcoal. I bought this recently and I've been really waiting for the first cook to use it on and this is gonna break it in. Earlier, I did a burn-off to get any sort of manufacturing greases off of it, so it's ready to go. Let's get our pork belly on. We're gonna go with our fat side down to start. Might give it a turn. We'll look and see how it's doing. Now, I wanna try and keep it away from the heat so it's not directly in contact with any heat underneath it. Get everybody adjusted here. Wanna get some applewood on here. We're gonna go ahead, get the lid on, let this get smoking. We'll come back in an hour and check it. My guess is this is probably gonna take three-ish hours. It'll all depend on how it's looking. I might wrap it, I might not. It all depends. See you back here in about an hour. All right, we are at the one-hour mark. Let's check our pork belly, see how it's doing, see if we need a spritz. That's getting some really nice color on it. Think I'm gonna give it a light spritz with some plain water. All right, we're gonna get the lid on and let this keep going for another hour. We'll check it then, see if we're gonna wrap it, or I might just brush it with a nice little sauce. See you back here at the two-hour mark. All right, we are at the two-hour mark. Let's go ahead and check our pork belly and kind of gauge at this time how we're gonna proceed. Am I gonna wrap it? Am I gonna give it a brushing of some sauce? We'll see. Oh, that's looking really nice. What I wanna do is do some probing here to see how tender we are and any temperatures. That's like 172. I'm not feeling very much resistance, so what I'm gonna do is go ahead and brush on some sauce here. Now, this is a third of a cup of soy sauce and two tablespoons of honey mixed together. These are basically done. You could eat them now. Like I said, three-ish hours. Sometimes the ish is closer to two. All right, I'm gonna get the lid on. We're gonna let these go for about 15, 20 more minutes. Then they will be done, that glaze will be set, and then we'll be ready to take them off. So I'll see you back here in about 15 or 20 minutes. Okay, we've been going for about 20 minutes now. Let's take a look, and we're gonna be taking this off. That is beautiful. Yeah, these are looking great. We're going inside. These are gonna go in a foil pan covered in foil for about 20 minutes just to rest. Then we'll start getting everything ready to build our banh mi. While our pork belly is resting, I wanna go ahead and get a mayo ready. Now, we're starting with about a quarter cup of mayonnaise. To this, I'm gonna add about a half a teaspoon of sesame oil, a teaspoon of sriracha, and two teaspoons of lime juice. Mix this up, a little taste of this. Yeah, that's good. All right, let's get our pork belly out here and slice some up. Now, our pork belly here turned out absolutely gorgeous, almost a candy consistency to the outside because of that last bit of sauce we brushed on with the honey in it. Let's go ahead and slice some up for our banh mi. Look at that. That is gorgeous. Let's cut some more. Really, you can slice this as thin or as thick as you want. If it's really chilled down, and you can do this cold, it slices easier, but this is still warm. I think I'll go with the thick piece here at the end. All right, let's build this banh mi. I have a baguette here or part of a baguette that I've sliced in half. Now, before I start building this, this is my version of a banh mi. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of more traditional versions of a Vietnamese banh mi. I've had, I don't know, 50 or 60 of them in my lifetime. So this is just my version. Please don't come at me and say, that's not a banh mi. That's my banh mi. First thing I wanna do is get some of our mayo that we made on here. Give it a generous spread of this. Now, the order of this is completely up to you, but I'm gonna go with some shredded carrots on here. Then I'm gonna go with pork belly. Get as much on here as you want. Next up, some pickled daikon radish. Now, I made these myself, and I might do a video about how to pickle daikon. It's really easy, but you can find these in many Asian markets, really, really good. Very refreshing. Some thinly sliced cucumber, some cilantro. If you don't like cilantro, leave it off. I'm gonna take our top bun, get a little more mayo on here, and we crown it. There it is, our smoked pork belly banh mi. Let's dive in and have a taste. I'm gonna go ahead and cut this in half just to make it a little more manageable. I've been waiting for this for a few hours. Let's see. The thing I like about this is it's rich and refreshing. There's the richness from that pork belly, no doubt, but the vegetables we add in there, especially that pickled daikon and the mayo, it just brings that refreshing feeling as you're eating it. Like, it's not too heavy. Man, it's good. Everything came together in this. The marinade on the pork belly, that glaze at the end, the additional ingredients, the carrot, the cilantro, the cucumber. If you've never had a banh mi, a pork belly banh mi is a great way to start, especially when you're gonna be smoking it. You could fry it up and have it more like a crispy texture to it, but I really like the smoked pork belly. Works great in this.