Let’s talk about Pork Belly. The last 24 hours of my life have been devoted to a gorgeous hunk. A hunk of pig. If you’re in Texas, our lort and savior H‑E‑B, carries 4 lb. vacuum sealed pork belly for your worshipping needs. I love using my kitchen appliances while under the influence, so making a Sous-vide-que pork belly was right up my alley.
Ingredients for Sous Vide Marinade:
- 1/4 cup mirin
- 1/3 cup soy sauce
- 1/3 cup rice wine vinegar
- 1 tsp ground ginger
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 tbsp honey
- 1 tbsp sesame oil
- 1 – 4lb pork belly, skin on
This one is going to schvitz in the hot bath for 16 hours at 165 degrees. Be super careful when you take this baby out because the meat is going to try to fall apart on you, and we can’t have that. You can go straight to the smoker if you want, but I chilled Porky for a few hours in the morning while we prepped ingredients for ramen.
I used the Kamado for the first time solo (sort of, hubby cleaned the ashes and lit it), and I’m hooked. There was something really soothing about manipulating the top dial for two hours while protecting my wine from the yearly influx of flies. We live on a sand-filled swamp that some contractor thought was a good idea to build on. Early summer is like The Birds but with 300 flies the size of your thumbnail dive-bombing you.
Smoke the belly over indirect heat at 225 degrees until the belly reaches 185 internally. If you go straight from the bath to the smoker this should take around 45 minutes. Since I chilled mine, it took around 2 hours.
Be super careful when you pull the pork belly from your smoker. I had to use a huge spatula to slide it off the grate. I also had to throw the Puppy into the yard and tell him to scream like Tippi Hedren to keep the flies away from me.
For the Shoyu ramen and marinated eggs I sort of followed this recipe on Delish. I halved the Tare marinade and simmered for an hour on the stove before chilling and using for the soft boiled eggs and ramen assembly. The Tare was super sweet, so I’m really glad I didn’t use it for the pork belly as the recipe suggested.
Overall, the ramen process itself was time consuming for not that great of a result, but that pork belly is life. Crack a bottle of your favorite red and get cooking.
– Lin
The Cooking Wine-O 