CRISPY PORK BELLY RECIPE - No Boil, No Fry, No Salt Crust

This video is sponsored by Squarespace, an all-in-one platform to build a beautiful website. Get 10% off your first purchase by going to squarespace.com slash Pailin's Kitchen. Welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen. So today I am finally going to make a much requested recipe, crispy pork belly, which in Thai is called Moo Krob. So Moo is pork and Krob as you can probably tell by the way it sounds means crispy. So in Thailand, Moo Krob is actually typically deep fried, which we're not going to do today. I got one better for you. We're just going to roast it and it's going to come out even better if you ask me. So if you search the internet, you are going to find a lot a lot of different methods of creating crispy pork belly. Some of which are I think unnecessarily complicated. So I have what I have for you today is what I've distilled down to just the bare essentials of what you need to do plus the actual principles of how this works so you understand what you're doing and you're going to have success with it. All right, let's get started. So important thing number one that a lot of recipes will not talk about is choosing the pork belly, which actually has quite an impact on your recipe. When you go buy pork belly, I recommend going to an actual butcher rather than trying to buy whatever pieces are available at the grocery store because the evenness of your pork is very important. So what you see here is my pork belly jigsaw puzzle. The missing piece is the one that I removed to prepare for today's shoot, but you can visualize. So the whole belly is like this big, right? When you go to the butcher, ask for the center cut because the center cut will have the most even distribution of fat. You want as even and straight lines of fat and meat as possible. It'll give you the best result. The edges of the pork belly, whichever edge you look at, is going to have more fat and not as much meat and when you bake it, it's going to like pucker up funny and then it's going to be like a mouthful of just fat. It's not good. So when I bought this piece, it was a rectangle like this. What I then did was trim off the ends that are not usable. So this one, obviously there's like a chunk of skin missing. You want to trim that off and then if you see here as well, look how uneven. Same here on the other side. Okay, so that's trimmed off and then I'm left with the more reasonable piece, which I could have cooked this whole piece, but it's too much. So I divided it in this manner and I divided it so that the piece that I'm using is actually the center of the center because that's the best. With the trimmings that have uneven fat, those are good for stews, like long simmering stews. I'll link to a couple of recipes down below where it's not quite as important that the piece is nice and flat and straight. Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to poke tons and tons and tons of holes in the pork skin and that's important because it's going to break down the skin and allow it to puff into those little crispy bubbles that you want. If you don't poke the skin, the pork will still be crispy but it's not going to be puffy, you know what I mean? And the puffy is kind of what we're going for. So what I like to use is this, which is a meat tenderizer. It's got lots of sharp needles right here and I love it for a couple things. It's sharp and there's lots of needles so you're not spending 10 minutes poking individual holes with a skewer. The other thing is you cannot go too deep with it because your force is spread over such a large amount and you don't want to go too deep because if you poke the meat the juices from the pork will flow up while you roast it and then it'll soak out the skin. You can also use wooden skewers which I've used before but you want to make sure they are the thick big skewers not the thin little ones because that'll break. I've also used a paring knife like a little knife with a sharp tip but you want to be really careful with that because that's really sharp and it's a single point so it's really easy to go too deep with that. You cannot use a fork because this is raw. Raw pork skin is really tough. You might have seen other recipes that use a fork but that's because they have cooked the skin. So some recipes will ask you to boil the pork in advance to fully cook it. The skin becomes soft then you can fork it. I find the boiling an unnecessarily complicated step so we're not going to boil that today but if you're going to do the boiling then you can use a fork. And now all you have to do is just poke the heck out of this pork get as many holes as you can. If you're trying to be quiet because you're living upstairs you can also like go gentler and just really use your body weight. It does not look like anything is happening but if you look really closely you can start to see really really tiny holes. I don't think you can see it in the camera but like you can you can see some here. And then what you want to do this step is optional but it's nice to score the skin first so that when you go to serve it you're not having to cut through a hard sheet of crispy pork skin. And I was going to use my big knife but I realized that this might be just the right job for my tiny little cleaver. I would say like one inch strip. Come on little cleaver you can do it. You can do it. Okay forget it. Yeah you just want to go through the skin. There we go. So now let's deal with the marinade. I'm going to flip the pork over. Another thing I want to point out is if you're looking at this and you're seeing a lot of this fat or you're seeing that the meat is really uneven it might be worth trimming it because like some of this that's not good. You can just trim that out. With the marinade in Thailand they actually most of the time just salt it with nothing in it but I like to actually put some five spice powder which is the Chinese style which I have. You can buy from the store but I also have a recipe for making it yourself. Try not to get the spices on the skin so that the skin won't have a funny color and then burn actually when we go to broil the skin at the end. A touch of white pepper. This is also optional. All right now we're going to flip it onto the skin side. So now this is where I need to talk a little bit about the principle of crispy pork belly so you understand what it is you're trying to do here. What we need to do at this point is to dry out the skin as much as possible so that when we roast it and broil it the skin will puff up. If there's too much moisture in the skin it won't get crispy and the way to do it one we're going to do two things. One we're going to let it sit in the fridge for 24 hours uncovered. Okay I've seen recipes that say 12 hours I've gone as low as 18 hours but to be absolutely sure 24 is guaranteed. The other thing that we're going to do is I'm going to salt the skin and not only will that season the skin the salt will also draw out some moisture and help that drying process along. You don't want to go heavy, you want to get this you don't want this to get too salty but you want to be thorough. I'm going to let this sit for 20 minutes and then you'll see that the water will have come up and out of the skin and then we're going to dab it dry before we stick it in the fridge. Now you may have seen other recipes where they do a salt crust like a really thick layer of salt on the pork when the pork is roasting. The idea of that is the same where that salt is drawing out moisture from the skin however I find that when you do that it's easy to make the skin too salty especially if your salt is too fine. The other thing is I find that once that salt crust dries out and it's done its thing in the oven then it just kind of fits on top of the pork skin and actually prevents the pork skin from drying out further in the oven heat. So I think it's better to do the salting now let the salt do its thing now and then when we put the pork in the oven nothing is shielding it from just natural evaporation during the roasting process okay and it also doesn't waste as much salt. So there you go you can see how much liquid has come out this is perfect and I'm going to dab it with a paper towel which not only will absorb the water but will absorb excess salt and then any large grains of salt remaining I would just brush that off. Now that is going to go into the fridge uncovered for 24 hours if you're worried about the meat drying out don't worry it's not going to dry out that much and any drying out that happens will only concentrate the pork flavor. Before we get cooking let me tell you more about today's sponsor. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence whether it's a website an online shop or a portfolio. You can get your domain build your website and host it all in one place and most importantly you don't need to know how to code at all they make it really easy for anyone to use. My husband is a graphic designer as many of you know and he could have designed his own website but he used Squarespace for his portfolio because it's so easy so convenient and all their templates look professional and beautiful. Now the best part my viewers can get a free trial by heading over to squarespace.com slash pylinskitchen and when you are ready to launch you can use the offer code pylinskitchen for 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain and I will link to everything in the description below. Alright so here is the piece that I prepped yesterday so it has had basically a full 24 hours as you can see how much drier that skin is and it's going to go into a 350 degree oven about 50 to 60 minutes. You want the internal temperature to be a minimum of 145 degrees Fahrenheit so while that's going let's make a dipping sauce. The pork is going to be rich and fatty and salty like so in for Thai people we always like something tart too and spicy to cut the grease so I got fish sauce and then I'm gonna add a little bit of lime juice using my mini cleaver which will redeem itself. Yay there we go so about equal parts lime juice to fish sauce a lot of spicy so some dried roasted chili flakes and just a little bit of sugar to balance out all that sweetness. See as you can see I barely even have any recipe I'm just kind of guesstimating here because I do this so much. Now we'll let that dissolve and then what I really like to add is toasted rice powder. So toasted rice powder is basically rice this is sticky rice but you can use jasmine rice and that I toast it in a dry saute pan until it's nice and golden brown like this and I'm gonna just pound it in my mortar and pestle that'll give us a little bit of body body and also aroma. It's gonna smell so good it smells good already and I'm just grinding it up okay so that is going in what I will leave to the end is some chopped green onions or cilantro if you have it any greenery or you can just leave it like this this is great let me just give it a taste perfect this looks great I mean it doesn't look great it looks it looks the way it looks right now okay I'm just gonna temp it but it should be okay oh yeah it's reading at 156 that's between like 145 to 155 is exactly where you want to be right now so what I'm seeing on the skin this little puddle here is just fat that has come up from when we scored the skin so I'm just gonna dab that because it will interfere with our skin crisping next thing we're gonna do is we're going to put this under the broiler to puff and crisp up the skin so I'm gonna switch my oven to broil and I'm also going to move the rack so that the pork is gonna end up at least 10 inches away from the broiling element because what you don't if it's too close it will burn before it has a chance to crisp up okay so you want and it's gonna be either the most the lowest rung or the second lowest rung in your oven okay so that's going in and it is going to take about 20 minutes depending on the oven I wish we had a camera set up here to show you what's happening but unfortunately we don't so I'm gonna use my phone and see what I can what I can share with you wow so one thing I want to add is you really want to keep an eye on it this is the first time I'm working with Adam's broiler so I don't know well first time in a long time I don't know where his hotspots are I'm noticing a spot on one side of the pork that's starting to brown a little bit much so I'm just gonna tent it with foil okay I think my mascara just melted I'm actually done and that's a little bit faster than I anticipated because Adam's broiler his lowest rung oh sorry I was doing mangoes his lowest rung is not as low as I wanted to go but look at this look how puffy and crispy it is a little bit brown that's totally okay wow that only took actually 10 minutes look at this look how bubbly now you do not cut into it you do not you have to let it rest for I would say at least for this size at least 15 minutes because right now if you cut into it it's just gonna gush out pork juices everywhere and your pork will be drier same thing as when you cook a steak you want to let it rest or any kind of roast any big pieces of meat you want to let it rest I am so excited you have no idea okay so here's our pork some people say to turn it upside down to cut so that it's easier to not cut through the skin but then that breaks all my beautiful bubbles if you turn it upside down then you go like this I don't want to do that so I like to score it so then I can easily go like this oh my god it's so beautiful look it's perfect a little bit pink which is perfect pork you can have medium but if you don't like that you just cook it longer make sure you bring it up to 165 degree fahrenheit then you'll have pork that's completely well done okay that's up to you but I highly recommend a little bit of pink you're gonna have so much juice in look at all this juice the bubblies see how thick it puffed up so it's not just crispy it's like puffed up and thicken that is beautiful that is what you want right there oh and by the way for our patreon members who have access to the show after the show for our bonus content this week I want to talk you through the other methods that are out there and why I chose not to do them or why I tried them and it didn't make any difference didn't make any sense so I'll talk you through all those different methods as well and if you want to know how to become a patreon member I will put the link in the description box below oh my god perfect I feel like this is my best one yep crunchy super crunchy as you can hear it's just perfectly seasoned both the meat and the skin you cannot deny that sound now let's try it with the dipping sauce this is the most exciting part okay I want to dip meat side so we don't ruin the crispy oh yeah that's it so good the tartness and the spiciness really cuts the fat I find that for me if I eat it straight up I can't eat very many pieces because it's quite rich and fatty but if I dip I can eat a lot more with that and that's it I hope you give this a try the recipe as always will be on hotthaikitchen.com and when you make it let me know how it goes I really want to see a photo you can tag me on twitter tag me on instagram or post it to my facebook page if you haven't subscribed to the show make sure you do so you don't miss an episode and click the bell icon as well so you get a notification when I post a new video thank you as always for watching and I will see you next time for your next delicious Thai meal