Weekends are for slow cooking experiments

There is nothing better to take a sunny weekend slow and have some friends over to enjoy food to its finest. One of the thing I love to do is make it like day full program where it all eventually focusses on food that takes the whole day, but also where it takes the rest of the day to enjoy the food.

I guess grilling is the way to go in the summer, but it already starts the day before if you ask me.

Prepare prepare prepare

Where in a lot of dishes you should have the best quality meat to use for your food to get it right, with grilling I always find that it has a lot more effect when you give a lof of loving in advance as well.

Getting a piece of pork belly from the local butcher where you know the animal had some love as well also helps to do the trick. There is a lot of difference in there compared to the supermarket quality, and honestly...these local guys have a lot better quality stuff lying there which also doesn't break the bank on getting it.

Better said, it is a lot cheaper and friendlier to get it at shop from the local guy, and nothing wrong as well with supporting the local community.

Fair enough, these may even be the preparations before the preparations even hahaha.

On to the marinating game

It just makes a lot of difference to marinate your proteine overnight before. Apart from that it really has the time to integrate into the tissue, it also makes the fiber of the tissue a lot more tender which means your pork belly will fall apart afterwards.

As I was going for some Asian style food the marination sauce contained something like sweet ketjap, sweet chili, onion powder, garlic and smoked paprika powder and just a little bit of honey in there as well.

I went for the very non fancy way of putting this all in a ziplock bag and adding the pork belly in there as well. Why a ziplock and not in an ovenplate? Well with the ziplock you can close it air tight and you can also 'massage' the bag to get all of the juices in all sides of the meat.

Turn it over every hour if you have the chance and all the fluids wil get in every corner. What I also did was make a few carves into the fatty side of the pork belly so it has a bigger surface to marinate in to. Honestly, I this this is essential for the proces but absolutely based on nothing ;)

Take your time

In the morning I took the marinated pork out of the fridge but still left it in the bag as I let it set on room temperature. Again another essential to start from a decent temperature in stead of a fridge temperature, this will help on the tenderness as well.

Inside the barbeque I put the charcoal in a snake so that it will take a tremendous amount of hours to burn as it stays in low temperature. It needed less than 4 hours to cook perfect. And yeah, i do use a temperature probe to find out what the iside temperature is..otherwise you are lost and have to open the lid of the bbq a lot.

I did open it every hour though to check of the fire was still going and most important to rub in the meat a bit more with some of the left over marination sauce.

In the mean time I made this awesome Asian salad which would accomany the porkbelly as its best friend. The salad is with glass noodles, carrot slices, cucumber mango, mint and cilantro and some spring onions

But the most important part for this salad is the sauce which you toss on it only at the moment of eating. Something with soy, lemon juice, fish sauce, diced hot pepper, loads of sugar and garlic and that is the way to go!

I also took some bao buns and steamed them for a second with some boiling water to get them soft and moisty. I also made a mayo sauce with mayo, lemon juice and sriracha sauce for on the bun as well.

And that was it all! Slice the porkbelly in thin slices. Take a bao bun and sauce it in with some sriracha mayo. Take one or two slices of pork belly and toss tome salad over it among with the dressing.

For home cooking? I was damn proud actually, I love me some slow cooking!