The Crispiest and Crunchiest Cantonese Roast Pork Belly (Siu Yuk)

Hear that? That's crispy. Crispy, puffy, shattery skin, and juicy succulent meat. This is Cantonese roast pork belly. Most of the time you can find crispy pork belly in Chinatown barbecue shops. They're built for making this. They have these giant wood-burning ovens and rotisserie spits that they can roast the whole side of pork on, not just the belly. But when you go to make this at home, you run into a few issues making it. So you've got a couple options here. For those who are more gear-oriented, they might be using sous vide, but probably ends up a little bit pale, a little bit anemic, not crispy, and not what you're looking for. You could be using an air fryer or a hot oven. That gets the skin nice and puffy and crispy, but then the meat ends up kind of rubbery or dry. This recipe uses the best of both worlds. We sous vide it, but then we air dry it. And air drying desiccates the meat so it puffs up perfectly in the air fryer. All right, let's get to making this. We're going to be making our cure for the pork belly. We're starting with just a couple spices. So we've got white pepper and sand ginger, which is part of the galangal family. It's got a really medicinal sort of flavor and it's used in all kinds of dishes in China and Southeast Asia. What we're going to do is just grind up all these spices and then combine it with our salt. So I'm looking for a pretty fine grind here, just so that everything's nice and broken down and it'll be well distributed within the cure. So into the bowl right here. And then we've got a little bit of kosher salt. This is about one percent salt in relation to the total weight of the pork. So I'll just give it a mix. You can use your fingers here. Get it nice and evenly distributed. So as long as it's nice and fine like this and we can sprinkle it, you're good to go. So we've got our pork belly here. We're looking for a pretty level, even piece of pork belly here. We don't want any particular parts to be thicker than others. Otherwise, when we go to crisp it at the end, it might cook unevenly. We're also looking at the grain structure of the actual pork. So in Chinese, we call it 五花肉, which means five flour meat. If you can count from the skin side, we're counting one, two, three, four, five, even six layers of alternating fat and meat. On the same side, we've got this also big layer of fat and that's to be expected. Even within the same piece of pork belly, we've got a lot of variants. Like this side is a little fattier, but this side is also a lot leaner. So ideally, you just want an even distribution of fat and lean meat. All right, so we're getting into curing. I've got a sheet tray. I've got pork. I'm just going to lay it here. And we've got our cure. And there's no rhyme or reason to this, but we're just going to start sprinkling on top. Only the meat side here. I'm trying my best not to get it onto the skin. You can kind of press it in. Don't worry about any of the spices sort of falling onto the sheet tray. That's all right. We can kind of press it. One of the things about cooking sous vide is that sometimes if you have a product like pork belly with skin, the salt can kind of mess with the texture of the skin, which in our application here, if we're crisping it, that kind of gets in the way. I found through some trials that it was just better to just salt or cure the meat side. Another thing to note is there's a lot of spices in this cure, so I thought it was going to sort of discolor the skin side as well. So once you get to the hot heat finish or that high heat crisping step of this, all those spices, if they were on the skin side, they would burn. So for that reason, we're just doing our best to keep the spices off the top. So I'm just going to keep pressing and just finish it off. Try and wipe off the excess off the top. You're just going to transfer it over here, pop it over, and that's the guy. So we're going to pop this into the fridge uncovered for about eight hours. So we've got two pieces of pork here. This is the one we just cured, and this is the one that has cured for about eight hours. And as you can see, the skin has dried out a little bit, but along the edges, you can see that it's also cured quite a bit. And so at this point, this is ready to cook in our sous vide bath. We're going to grab a Ziploc bag. You could also use a vacuum seal bag if you've got that at home. What I like to do is just fold the top quarter of the bag so it's nice and clean. And we're just going to go right in, fold this up, leave a little bit unsealed for when we put this into the bath. And then we're going to go over to our sous vide bath, and we're just going to gently drop it in. Pork belly has a high proportion of fat, and like most fats, like oil, they tend to float. It's really important to, A, get all the air out of the bag, and I'm lowering the bag into the water to displace most of this air. Also, we left this hole here for that to happen. I'm just going to seal it up slightly, and as some added insurance, I'm going to put a wire rack just like that. I like to use a clip, so just clipped to the side of our bath, and then cover it. So we're going to cook this pork belly for about 16 hours at 154 Fahrenheit. At the end of that cook, most of that fat is going to be rendered and sort of soft. It's going to have this steaky quality to it throughout the meat. It's going to be succulent. It's going to be really, really nice for when we go to crisp it up. All right, so our belly has been swimming for about 16 hours. We're ready to take it out. I'm just going to unclip here, take our weight off, and then lift our bag out. I like to give it a little bit of a dry, and now we just take it out of the bag. Just be careful to leave all those juices in there. Next step is we're going to air dry this. With this pork belly, there's a little bit of a wonky shape to it. It's just part of the sort of variance in contraction and muscle contraction because there's an uneven distribution, say, of fat and meat. So if this were all meat, you'd probably get a more even shape. But because there's a lot of variance, sometimes you end up with this kind of shape, but it's going to be okay. One of the keys to getting really, really crispy, puffy skin is to use a poker or a skewer to sort of poke holes through the skin. That's going to let all of that subcutaneous fat, all that fat that's right below the surface, to render out more. But one of the challenges with pork belly is that the skin is typically really, really thick and really hard to puncture. Sous vide cooking sort of renders that skin a little bit more gelatinous, so we can poke through it really easily. So I've got a sausage skewer here. It's three pronged. It's about a quarter inch between each prong. It makes this job really, really easy. So I'm just going to start. There's no rhyme or reason to this, but just go and prick. And you can see it punctures really easily. Typically, I'd have to like use a lot of force, but I'm being really gentle here and it's going right through. One thing to note as well is that I'm not going too deep. I'm only going about an eighth of an inch below the skin because I don't want to get to the meat layer because the meat layer has a lot of water. So if I were to puncture through to that layer, a lot of that water would come up to the surface. What I've found is that that hinders the crisping step. So I really only want to get just below the surface so that that fat can render out. Do your best to keep it at even distances, but you can do this as much as you want as long as you don't puncture to that meat layer. If you don't have this tool, you could easily use like a really sharp wooden or metal skewer. That would work really well. It just might take a little bit more time. If you didn't even have that, you could use a really sharp paring knife and just use the point of it. Because the skin is so gelatinous and rendered out, you could even use like a fork, but it's nice to have this little tool here. It makes the job really easy. So I'm just doubling back, working my way through from edge to edge. You know, once you start doing it, you'll get a feel for how much pressure you should apply. It's really not that much, just lightly puncturing. And that's it. We have outlets for the fat to sort of render out. And even as I've finished doing this, you can see some droplets start to bead at the surface. And that's a really good sign that means that we've done our job here. And air drying is a really important step for this recipe. Most sous vide recipes for Cantonese roast pork, they go straight into the oven for this step. And that's a bit of an issue because you usually can't really crisp up the skin at that point because it's so much moisture in this surface level. So the best solution I've found is to take the time to air dry the surface, to desiccate the skin. So at this point, it's ready to go in the fridge. We're going to keep it in the fridge for anywhere from two days up to, you could even go as far as six days, but ideally about three days. And that's to really dry out the skin so that it can really puff up in the air fryer at the end. We're going to be making a classic sort of Cantonese dipping salt. Dipping salt is a condiment that you'll often see in restaurants. It's essentially a seasoned roasted salt. It's got usually sand ginger, it's heavy on white pepper, a little bit of five spice often, as well as some MSG and sugar. Most shops or restaurants will serve like roast chicken or roast pork belly in this case. And they'll serve it with this dipping salt, which you kind of just dip each piece into and then you eat it that way. So a super classic condiment. In this case, we're going to be using kosher salt. It's traditional to use table salt like this. If you're using kosher salt, you're not going to want to go for table salt as well. So it's just to sort of optimize things, make your life a little bit easier. But in that sense, we do want the kosher salt to have a little bit of the texture of that fine table salt. So all we're going to do is drop our kosher salt into the grinder, give it a few pulses. And that's literally it. We've got our ground kosher salt here and our fine table salt in my other hand. As far as texture goes, this kosher salt is pretty close to the fine table salt. It's a little bit fluffy still, but it'll still be great for dipping. We've preheated the wok to about 400 degrees. We're looking for it to get pretty hot. Usually it would smoke out if there's any excess oil on the surface, at which point I would just make sure it's nice and wiped out and dry. It really helps to have a nicely seasoned wok here. So I'm just going to let it come back up to temp slightly. All right. First thing, kosher salt in. Don't worry about any of this. We're just going to let this heat up. This will generally take about 30 seconds. And typically we would be looking for a little bit of a color change. I can hear it crackling a little bit, which is a good indicator for me. And as you can see, there's some wisps of smoke coming off the surface. Also a good sign. I'll give it a little toss. There's not going to be a ton of color change here, but salt is really conductive. So it's going to carry a lot of that heat. So I know that my salt, it's just beginning to turn a little bit pale, pale, pale brown. So I'm going to go in with the spices. So we've got our sand ginger, white pepper, and a tiny bit of five spice. Just give that a toss. At this point, it's going to smell really fragrant as the spices sort of toast up very, very lightly. This is really only five to 10 seconds worth on the heat. Starting to wisp up even more, and then I'll turn off the heat. It's pretty much done. All we have to do is season it a little bit more. So I've got some sugar, adds a little bit of sweetness and bulks out the saltiness. So it's not just aggressively savory. And to boost the savoriness, we've got some MSG. Give it a toss. We'll transfer it to a bowl here. So this is our dipping salt. It's super hot right now. So I wouldn't go around poking with your finger in there. It's probably not a good idea, but yeah, this will go great with our roast pork. Our pork has been air drying for about three days. So it's nice and leathery on the top of the skin here. It's not quite fully dry. It's a little bit of give to it. But at this point, I know that it's going to be really nice and crispy when it goes under the air fryer. So it's going to pop up. We're going to wrap this pork and make a foiled boat. Now, one thing about air frying or cooking at high temperature is that the edges of the pork tend to burn or cook a little bit faster than the middle. So a foil boat like this is a really simple way to sort of shield the sides so that you can uncrimp them later and then crisp up the whole piece evenly. So I'm just coming around the sides. There's no rhyme or reason to this. You don't have to be perfect. There's about a quarter inch-ish border around the edges. Could be more, could be less, but the idea is to shield the sides. Make sure there's no crazy, crazy areas that aren't covered. Pretty low tech, doesn't look great, but it'll do the job. So we go onto our sheet tray. We're going to cook this in a 465 degree oven on super convection or an air fryer. If you didn't have an air fryer at home or any oven with convection, you could just crank up the temperature on your conventional oven to about 490 degrees, almost 500. I found 490 was the sweet spot. This is going to cook for roughly 40 minutes total. The first 30 minutes are going have the foil boat crimped along the sides. So that's going to let the middle puff up. And then for the last five to 10 minutes, we're going to uncrimp these edges and allow the sides to catch up. All right. So this pork has been roasting for about 30 minutes, given enough time for the center to really puff up, at which point we're going to uncrimp the sides along the sides here. It hasn't fully crisped up at all, but because it's still hot along the edges, it's not going to take very long for the sides to catch up. So we're going to cook this for another five to 10 minutes to let the sides catch up and puff up. So because pork belly is usually pretty irregularly shaped, it's important to rotate it while it's cooking. So for the first 30 minute cook, we rotated it once. During this last crucial step of crisping for the last five to 10 minutes, we're just going to really watch it and keep it rotating so that there's an even distribution of heat and puffing. All right. Belly's out of the oven. To me, this looks almost perfect. You'll notice along the edges, it's caught up pretty well to the center. You also notice a little bit of burning here. I can live with that. In fact, a lot of shops in certain Chinatowns will purposefully char the skin as they puff it and then they'll scrape it off to get a little bit of a fuzzy texture and that creates a nice textural component to the skin. But here, I'm not too worried about it. So at this point, I'm going to let this rest for about 10 minutes before carving into it. I wouldn't want to slice into it immediately. It's kind of ripping hot and there's a lot of hot fat going on. So I just want to let this calm down. So we've got two pieces of pork belly here. And the only difference is that this one's been air dried for three days. And that's really the importance of air drying here. If we were to just take this out of the sous vide bath and cook it straight away in the air fryer, this is what you end up with. So it's gummy. It's not really puffed all that much and it's going to stick between your teeth when you go to eat it. On the flip side, we've got this nice crispy exterior. It's fully puffed up and it's going to shatter against your teeth. So that's great. Our belly is rested. It's ready to carve. Typically in shops, you might see them use a big heavy cleaver and just hack through it through the skin side. That can be a little bit intimidating. So an easier way to do this at home is just to flip it over. Now, if I were serving this in a restaurant, I might trim along the edge here to just get like a square side, but I'm not worried about that here. I'm going to go down the middle, slice through the meat nice and easy, just goes right through. And then using the heel of my non-dominant hand, I'm just going to rock it. And you get two even pieces like that. We're going to go into strips. So just size it up. I'm probably going to get three strips this way, going this way. So here's one strip again. Hit it. And then park this over here. And then a second strip. And those are your three strips. I'll just repeat that on this side. So about a one inch cut there into three. There's one. There's two. So from here, I can portion it into more manageable morsels. So that would be a little bit longer than what I cut width wise. So just want to size this up. You don't have to be crazy about it. One, two, three. I'll probably get about an inch and three quarters and that. So that would be your finished pork belly like that. And we'll just repeat and get our nice bite size pieces. So we did all this work to sous vide. We air dried for three days, really drying out the skin before we blasted it in the hot air fryer. And so we've got this super crispy skin. You can see it's nice and puffy and crispy throughout. The meat is nicely rendered. The fat is rendered. It's juicy, looks succulent. So yeah, let's give this a shot. I'm just going to taste this without the dipping salt first. Yeah, super juicy. That skin is just like extra crunchy, shatters on the teeth. Exactly what I'm looking for. The meat is really nicely seasoned. It's really great. We'll try it with the dipping salt. Yeah, I'm getting all that medicinal sort of funky, really warm spice flavor. A little bit hit of that MSG and sugar. And all together, it's really close to what you would get in a shop. That's how you make Cantonese roast pork belly at home. 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