Roasted Pork Belly

I was in the mood for some pork belly the other day.  At first I was thinking of braising it to make Dongpo pork (东坡肉) but in the end I decided to roast it.



A search of the interwebs led me to David Chang's recipe for roasted pork belly from his momofuku cookbook.  I don't want to republish the recipe here, but I'm sure if you look you can find it too.

Ingredients
1.5 - 2 lbs. pork belly
2 TBSP salt
2 TBSP sugar

Directions
1. Remove skin from pork belly.

2. Place the pork belly into a roasting pan.  Mix salt and sugar and rub the mixture all over the pork belly.  Cover with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for 6-24 hours.  In this case, I replaced the skin on top, but as it turns out this was not necessary.  I initially started cooking the pork belly with the skin on top, but I eventually removed the skin to facilitate proper browning of the top fat layer.

3. Drain any excess liquid.  I removed the belly from the pan briefly for the second photo.

4.There are two basic approaches for roasting pork belly: (1) brown the pork belly and render out a good amount of fat using a high heat then drop the oven temperature or (2) roast the pork belly slow and low and then crank up the heat at the end to brown it.

I ended up using a hybrid method.  I started roasting my pork belly at 450F, intending to cook it for 30-40 minutes.  After 20 minutes I was afraid it might burn, so dropped the heat down to 250F and cooked it for 60 minutes.  I finished the roast at 450F for 20 minutes.