WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: All about pork belly!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark. And Mark is still recovering, so this week it's just the podcast Cooking with Bruce. I've got a one minute cooking tip. I'm going to talk about my relationship with pork belly. Yep. And I'm going to tell you what's making me happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip. Keep a toothbrush in the kitchen. Yep, and not for brushing your teeth at the kitchen sink.

That's actually a little disgusting, But it's a great cleaning tool for tight spaces like waffle irons or between the grids on a grill pan It's also great for scrubbing stubborn dirt off of potatoes and other sturdy vegetables like winter squash and the outside of melons So just like you change a toothbrush in your mouth every few months Yes, you should be changing your toothbrush every few months. Do the same thing with the toothbrush in the kitchen.

before I get to the next segment of this podcast, I want to thank you for listening to Cooking with Bruce and Mark and for supporting this podcast by giving us a review. Please go to wherever it is that you get your podcasts and leave us a review, give us a rating. Maybe I can even ask for five stars. Why not? Mark does all the time. And that's what really helps us with the analytics. We are not funded in any other way.

So we do appreciate you giving us those reviews and do appreciate your time that it takes to do that. And also love that you're here listening and with us on this cooking

journey. Okay, my relationship with pork belly. As a New York Jewish kid, you'd think that I'd have little relationship with pork belly, but You'd be wrong. Well, sort of. My relationship was with bacon. And it's really funny because when I talk to other people about their relationship with bacon, especially Jewish kids, Jewish people, they never ate bacon as a kid. What I hear was that bacon was like the forbidden thing. They might even eat bologna and ham at lunch, but they never ate bacon.

My house, we ate bacon. We never ate ham. In fact, Growing up, ham was the most Christian of all your meats. In fact, I didn't even know that, like, smoked ham existed until I was a teenager. We went to some cousin's house on Long Island. This is my mother's family. And they had served a smoked spiral cut ham. And my mother and her mother were both Outraged that this cousin would do it.

And once I tasted it, I didn't speak to them both for a week because I was so angry that they'd kept that from me for so long, but bacon was a big thing in our house. Look, it was even a big thing in that grandmother's house who was upset with the ham. And she only bought kosher meat. She had meat dishes and dairy dishes. But I guess, you know, her idea of kosher was a separate pan for the bacon because my grandfather insisted on bacon. He was not kosher at all.

He did not come from a religious family the way she did. So she had bacon for him, but it was in a separate pan and that's bacon and it's smoked and it's succulent. And for a lot of people who don't even realize it. Bacon is pork belly, right? It's just the pork belly that has been smoked, and then usually you buy it sliced. You can buy chunks of bacon, but usually you buy it sliced. Now, plain pork belly is like a whole other animal. The unsmoked kind of pork belly.

And it's used in cuisines all over the world. It's used in Germany, it's used in France, the French eat it as charcuterie, it gets boiled in pâte au feu, it gets roasted. but you probably are going to see it more in Asian culture and even though as a family when I was a kid we went to Chinatown a lot for dinners. We went all the time and my parents loved Cantonese food.

It was a battle we had all the time because I wanted to go into a Sichuan restaurant and a Hunan restaurant and I wanted desperately to try hot chilis and hot foods that I read about, but they wanted to have chow mein. They wanted to have shrimp in lobster sauce. Again, you see, we weren't kosher, but we didn't eat ham. Really weird. And we didn't eat pork belly, except for the bacon kind. But shrimp in lobster sauce is a thing because there's no lobster.

It's basically shrimp in the kind of sauce you would serve with lobster if you were serving lobster. And that is totally an Americanized Chinese dish if I ever heard one. So we went there and I never got to eat pork belly and I didn't discover that pork belly was a thing until I went for my first Chinese cooking lesson at about age 18. I took these classes at the new school which is still around, new school in New York, and the guy teaching it was, get this, Norman Weinstein.

was the late 70s and only then could someone named Norman Weinstein be the Chinese cooking expert. That is not going to happen today. No relation, Weinstein, but no relation. And I have to say, I didn't love it. The first time he brought in this giant slab of pork belly, all I saw was all of that fat. Now, of course, bacon has the same amount of fat as pork belly, but when you cook the slices of bacon, the fat renders out, right?

And it shrinks down and you have the crunchy, crunchy bits that are left where the fat was. And this Pork belly that wasn't smoked was just way too fatty for me. And I had this thing about fat in my late teens all the way up to my 40s. I didn't eat fat. It upset my stomach. I didn't like it. I just had this aversion to big chunks of fat. I wouldn't eat chuck roast.

When Mark moved in, And he was a great cook, and he found out that I was making wolf bourguignon with top round, not even bottom round, but top round, because I didn't like fat. He nearly lost his mind. And then, he discovered the joys of Chinese delivery. And, my God, you have to really live in New York to understand the joys of Chinese food delivery. But, I never Let him get anything deep fried. He always said, oh, let's try orange beef for General Tsav's chicken.

I was like, that is nothing but deep fried gristle and fat chunks. We're getting white meat chicken. I would yell at them on the phone that I wanted a stir fried and not deep fried. And the poor thing, poor Mark, he never got any of that until much later. But now. Pork belly has become one of my go to meats for all sorts of dishes. Yes, I have overcome my aversion to fat. I love fried chicken. I love pork fat. I like chuck. I like everything that's gelatinous and rich and fatty and oily and yum.

So, pork belly has become one of my go to meats for all sorts of dishes. A lot of Asian dishes, of course, but also dishes that don't require soy sauce or fish sauce. Like, for one thing I love to roast pork belly and serve it with a French lentil salad. For this, I actually prefer pork belly without the skin. So if you're buying pork belly and it has the skin, you can ask them to cut it off. Or you could just slice it off at home. Just try not to get too much fat off as you slice the skin off.

A lot of salt, a lot of pepper. I put it on a rack on a roasting pan. 350 degrees on convection if you have it. A one pound piece or one and a half pound piece is going to take about 45 minutes to get crispy on the top and brown and the fat is rendering out. Inside is juicy and I serve it with a French lentil salad. And what I mean by that are those little green lentil dupuis. I boil those, I strain them, and then to make a dressing.

And this is the best part because it's a double pork belly dish.

To dress the lentils, I'm gonna chop up some bacon, yeah, some smoked pork belly, render that out, then with all of that fat in the pan, and the crispy bacon pieces, I'm gonna throw in a little bit of shallots, and some diced carrot, and some diced celery, and saute that in that bacon fat till they just start to soften, throw in some Dijon mustard, a little Worcestershire, then deglaze that pan with some white wine vinegar, Dump all of that into the lentils. And that is your French lentil salad.

Serve it with a pork belly and do not see a cardiologist for at least a month. But there is something. You can get in every French bistro that has pork belly in it, the smoked kind. Salad au lardon. Well, what is lardon in French? Bacon.

And to make a salad au lardon, you take the bacon chunks and you toss them, in this case, with frisee lettuce, and you make a dressing with all the bacon fat that was in the pan and you grate some parmesan over the top and it is an amazing dish especially when you top it with a poached egg. So those are the non Asian ways that I like to make pork belly. Let's talk about some of my favorite Asian dishes.

You could braise pork belly with soy sauce and rice wine and spices and that's usually called red cooking pork belly. You could also do twice cooked pork where you boil the pork belly and then you slice it up and then you stir fry it. with leeks and with fermented chili sauce, and crispy skin pork belly. This is kind of an Asian version of that roasted plain pork belly that I did with the French lentil salad.

So for crispy skin pork belly, you want to take your one and a half to two pound piece of pork belly and leave the skin on it. Then rub salt. all over it and set it in the refrigerator uncovered overnight. That salt is going to draw so much moisture out of the skin and out of the pork that it's going to help it get crispier the next day you wipe all the salt and moisture off of that, turn it upside down, score it in an X pattern through the meat, but not down all the way to the skin.

Rub some five spice powder into that. Okay, turn it back. You've got to take a lot of toothpicks or the sharp points of a carving fork, and you want to skin. You want to stab it and stab it and stab it like a hundred holes at least. You want to allow places for the fat to come up, for it to render out, for that to get super crispy. So the skin's been salted, the skin has been wiped, the skin has been poked, and now the skin is going to get rubbed with a little vinegar.

Now you have to put the pork belly on a piece of foil and fold the foil up just so it covers the sides of the pork belly but leaves the top totally uncovered. Now put that piece of foil with the pork belly in it on a tray. Put that in the oven at about 325 degrees. Oh, for about an hour. hour and then crank the oven up at that point to 450 and you are going to watch that skin bubble up and get crispy and turn into something that looks almost deep fried.

that takes maybe 10 minutes at the high heat. So you really want to be careful and watch it and make sure it doesn't burn but it does bubble up. Okay, I talked about red cooking pork belly. So I have to tell you how I do it. Cut the pork belly into 1 to 1 12 inch cubes with the skin on. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Throw in those cubes of pork belly and you're going to let them boil for about 5 to 7 minutes.

Skim off any scum that comes to the top of that pot and then drain the pork belly and put them on a tray and let them cool. Very common when you're braising meat in Chinese cooking you will boil it first to get some impurities out before you actually start the real cooking. Now we're going to take about four tablespoons of sugar. If you have access to rock sugar, Asian yellow or white rock sugar, you can use that.

I dissolve that in about four tablespoons of water in a skillet, and I'm going to caramelize that. I do it in a nonstick skillet. It makes it a little easier. And you're literally just going to boil that until the sugar turns golden brown, smells like burnt caramel. Now, when it gets to that point, you throw the cooled. Pork belly cubes into that pan with the caramel and toss it around and take it off the heat.

Now transfer that pork belly tossed in caramel into either a dutch oven or if you have a clay pot, that's the best thing to use. Throw them in a clay pot. You're going to put in a couple of star anise, a cinnamon stick, few tablespoons of chopped up ginger, three or four garlic cloves, oh, and four or five scallions cut into one or two inch pieces. Pour over that about a quarter cup of Chinese cooking wine, about a quarter cup of soy sauce, and then the rest with water.

Bring that to a simmer and let that simmer for about an hour and 20 minutes or until the pork belly is pretty tender. Skim the fat. Raise the heat, boil that down so the sauce is a little bit thicker, and that is amazing red cooking pork belly.

You know, a friend emailed me the other day and said Mark had mentioned in his book discussion group that she's part of, that I had made him pork belly for dinner and she wanted to know more about where to find it and what to look for when she's buying it. So here's what I told her. I have three pork belly outlets in my life. One is Costco. Yep. At least the Costco by me always has pork belly and it's kind of interesting the way they sell it.

Each package is about four to five pounds of pork belly, which has been cut into two inch wide, but long strips, each strip being about a pound and a half. That's really good for roasting. It's really good for some of these dishes, but it doesn't have the skin on it. So if the skin is important to you, then that's probably not the best place to get it. You can go to an Asian market. The one I go to always has two pound pieces of pork belly with the skin on it.

They're the perfect size for almost everything I need to do. The third outlet I have is a local farm. Shout out once again to Howling Flats Farm in North Canaan, Connecticut. The pork belly there is amazing. The meat is organic. The only problem was the last time I called and asked for pork belly. All they had were the giant 10 pound sides of pork belly. So I had to buy the whole thing, thawed it, cut it into pieces, shrink wrapped it, and refroze it.

And yes, you can thaw meat and refreeze it, but there is a rule to it. If you've thawed it in the fridge, it's okay to refreeze it. If you have thawed the meat on the counter or anywhere. That is higher than 40 degrees It is not safe to refreeze it. And it is never safe to refreeze ground meat of any kind. So, that's my take on pork belly. It is one of my favorite things. I hope you A lot of our books have pork belly recipes. Check them out.

And if you're making something amazing with pork belly, go to our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and share it. Show a picture. Tell us what you made. I want to know about your relationship with pork belly.

Okay. What's making me happy in food this week? Brisket, a classic Jewish food. I went to Costco and I got this giant 20 pound brisket. This is the biggest thing I've ever seen. And I cut it into four five pound roasts and I braised one last night with red wine and and carrots and sweet onions and mushrooms and fresh herbs. I put a little tomato paste and Worcestershire in it. It was absolutely amazing.

Mark asked for mashed potatoes with it, which he got because with his broken leg, he gets what he wants. And brisket was making me happy in food this week. That's it for today's episode. We talked about brisket. We talked about pork belly and we talked about toothbrushes kept in your kitchen. Thanks for joining me. Please share your thoughts about food at our website, bruceandmark. com or on our Facebook group page, cooking with Bruce and Mark and don't forget to subscribe.

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