Hey Hive!
We're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some new recipes I've been trying at home since I've been cooking a lot nowadays! Both because it's cheaper and also healthier to cook for yourself compared to eating out. While I have some regular recipes I do like to try new things and figured I'd share the new ones I've tried.
So I found this video of a recipe for making Cantonese style Roasted Pork Belly (aka Siu Yuk) in the air fryer and I was really intrigued. Siu Yuk or Shao Rou (in Chinese) is one of our favourite types of meat, so when I found out I can potentially make it in the air fryer I was excited to try it!
Here's the video:
https://youtube.com/shorts/z2qZKE_yB4M?si=3jerOWZ8rqWyX5nB
Ingredients:
- 500g pork belly
- salt
- white pepper
- 5 spice powder
I only had pork belly slices but I saw quite a few other videos where they used a big slab of pork belly you'd get at the butcher or the market. I think those would be better, but it's definitely more expensive so I wanted to try with the slices version first.
Step 1: Score the pork belly on the skin side.
I found this meat tenderizer that really helped in scoring since it pokes a lot of holes in the skin.
Step 2: Sprinkle the salt, white pepper and five spice powder on both sides of the pork belly, and rub it in thoroughly.
Step 3: Leave in the fridge for a few hours or overnight.
Step 4: Place the pork belly on aluminium foil skin side up.
Step 5: Cover the skin with a layer of salt.
The recipe called for rock salt but I only had regular salt so I used that. I had a hard time making a solid layer like in the videos so I tried not to put too much salt since it'd be difficult to scrape it off later.
Step 6: Cook in the air fryer for 25 minutes at 95°C.
After cooking this was what it looked like:
Step 7: Remove the salt crust and air fry again at 200°C for another 25 minutes.
So a lot of videos actually suggested total cooking time of about an hour. If you're using sliced pork belly like I am this is way too long, especially with how thin my slices were. For the second round of cooking I think just 10 minutes or so would be enough if you're using sliced pork belly. You can cook for a bit longer if it's not crispy enough then.
Step 8: Let the pork belly rest for 10 minutes before slicing.
Honestly it looked really good when it came out, but the skin was way too hard since I overcooked it.
We had a hard time slicing it since the skin was so hard. The meat also looked a little dried out.
It was quite unfortunate since it smelled so good.
We served it on top of rice and the meat itself was still pretty good, just that the skin was too dry and hard. It was unfortunate but it was my first time and I had to adjust the recipes to my air fryer as well.
It was a subpar first attempt and I was a little disappointed but these things happen sometime. It's okay, the next attempt will be better.
I ended up cooking porridge the next day since the meat was also a bit too salty since I couldn't get all the salt crust off. It complemented the porridge a lot better since the skin softened a little.
Overall it's still a very delicious dish but I would like to try it again and hopefully get it right the next time.
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
