Pork Belly Recipe with Gary Mehigan.

Ariston

Welcome to cooking with Ariston. You may not know this, Ariston is Italy’s number one cooking brand. And now i’m going to show you how to use the oven and cook a beautiful pork belly little apple and celery salad. So what’s the secret of cooking pork and getting the perfect cracking. Number one buy good pork. This is a Berkshire pork and it’s got a little bit of fat in it because it’s pork belly but that’s what makes it truely delicious. You need to salt the skin this is really important. So we’ve got a little mortar and pestle and I’ve

got some spices that really go well with pork. So fennel seed about a tablespoon, some cumin seed boom about a tablespoon and a star anise is pop one of those in. Basically no need to toast because you’re going to put this in the oven. This is going to act as a beautiful seasoning with salt and what salt does to the skin is draw the moisture out of the skin so that when you cook it it goes crispy. so fennel seed cumin seed smashed in with some salt a couple of tablespoon fulls. Just mix it around and then it’s going

to seem very extravagant but basically you just tip all of that salt over the top of the pork and just make a little layer all across the skin like that. Now we’re not going to bake it like that, that’s actually to draw that moisture out of the skin and what I do let’s pop that in the fridge uncovered overnight and then the following day you just brush the salt off and then pop that into the oven. So we’ll put this aside just for a minute and gee it smells delicious and we’ll talk about the oven.

I’ve got one of these at home it’s an open-space oven it’s really easy to use. I love it it’s just touch sensitive so to turn it on you’ve got a little button here. You’ve got some functions there’s twelve functions in all so you can go from just a standard grill to a convection grill to convection oven so really really easy to use. So all I want to do is just set my oven to fan-forced and then hit go and with the open space oven it’s got a preset temperature 200 degrees. Now for my pork recipe I need 220. The other thing you need to know and the

reason I like is because it’s a big oven for a 600 oven it’s 81 litres. So it’s one of the biggest in marketplace so love that. Imagine our pork is being sitting overnight all we do is we knock off that salt so just tap it off brush it off it doesn’t matter whether there’s some salt in the cracks is what we’ve got our butcher to do is to score the fat. Now we’re going to do is pop that in the oven, put it on a tray, a little bit of oil not too much because there’s quite a bit of fat in the pork belly and

I’m just going to rub that into the skin of the pork and then into the oven it goes. So I’m going to leave that pork in at 220 which is a high heat for about 20 minutes and the reason we do that is because we want to crisp up that skin or at least start that process and then we’re going to cook the pork for about another 40 minutes and I’m going to test that with a thermometer again 65 degrees in the middle but you know what one hour for a piece of pork belly like that should be absolutely perfect

whether you test it or not. So pork has been in for about an hour we’ve reduced the temperature remember after the first 20 minutes 180 and the cracklings going super crisp. So, looking good. This is what we’re after. Fair amount of fat that’s come out of that but now what we’re going to do is just let it rest remember it’s pork belly so it is a little fattier than say pork loin. So pork will go with a nice fresh salad and what I’ve got in here is some some green beans some celery and some lentils and I love incorporating grains and

things like that into salads like this because they go from being simple to being really delicious and quite complex. So celery beans lentils, going to pop an apple in there, apples and pork perfect combination and then just doesn’t matter odd shapes random shapes are better. A little bit of seasoning, some salt, some pepper and I’ve got some really delicious little lettuces and this little frizzy or frizzy lettuce and then we going to make a vinaigrette. Really simple vinaigrette little teaspoon of mustard pinch of pepper pinch of salt

and if you buy some interesting vinegars things like sherry sherry vinegar or even red wine vinegar they’ve just add another dimension to to the salad. So put in a couple of tablespoons and then add a couple of different oils if you use all extra virgin olive oil for example be quite bitter so I tend to use a plain olive oil, or a grapeseed oil. So you put enough in to split it there’s that old rule which is 1/3 vinegar two thirds oil but it’s up to you. These days I don’t put so much oil in, and a little bit of extra

virgin for flavour. And that’s our vinaigrette, no fuss. Let’s get our pork out of the pan. That is yummy and that little rest 5 – 10 minutes has just allowed it to calm down and just all those juices sort of equal out inside the meat. So let’s take a little slice see what it tastes like. So a little bit of porl and what we’ll do is just put touch a salad on the plate and then a little bit of vinaigrette just to finish it so just drizzle it around. So there we have a beautiful crisp clean healthy salad and the best crispy crackling you’ve ever had [Music]