Today is the day you've all been waiting for. Since the very beginning, you guys have been asking for my dad's Chinese Crispy Pork Belly. And finally, Daddy Lau's gonna teach us how to make this classic Cantonese BBQ favorite at home. Later in the video we're also making our biggest announcement ever. But for now, we’ll start with my dad’s secrets to crafting the crispiest pork belly skin. Hello, friends. How are you? Today, we're learning how to roast pork belly at home. Crispy roast pork. This is about 2 lb 10 oz of pork belly. Before we start, we'll briefly parboil the pork belly. Let's add the water. 2 cups of water is enough. Just a bit. Turn the heat on. High heat. When it comes to a boil, add the meat to briefly parboil it. In a large wok, we’ll bring 2 cups of water to a boil. Good, the water's boiling. Place the meat in, skin down. Give it a wiggle. Shirley asked, "How do you buy the pork belly with the skin on top?" You can get it in Chinatown. 99 Ranch as well. One day, when we went to Costco to buy meat, Daddy wanted to buy pork belly for this recipe, but because the meat was frozen, we couldn't see it well. When we went home, we opened it "Oh, there's no skin!" But the most attractive thing about crispy pork belly is the crunch of the skin! So if you don't have the skin, there's not much to this dish. Boil it until the skin is cooked, and it's easy to pierce through. This is quick, it only takes a few minutes. Is it on high heat? Yes, high heat! After a minute of boiling with the skin side down, we’ll flip the pork belly. Great, this side is done. Flip it over. After just 30 seconds of boiling with the meat side down, we can remove it. Great, we've parboiled the meat. Take it out. Okay, next! Place the meat in some cold water. Scrape it with a knife. Scrape off any debris from the surface. Scrape it clean. Do you have to scrape it? Pork skin can have hair on it. Scrape that off. After you scrape it, you see this debris, right? With a knife, we’ll scrape off any hair or dirt on the skin. Is that water for rinsing, or is it about the temperature? Yes, it's both. It's for rinsing it clean and to shock it with cold water. Now it's clean. When it's clean, pat it dry with paper towels. Soak up the water. Then, we’ll dry the pork belly with a kitchen or paper towel. Next, we'll poke some holes. You can use a toothpick, just poke holes like this. Some pieces of pork belly have very thick skin. You want to choose thicker skin. Don't buy pork belly with a thin layer of skin. Thicker skin makes crunchier skin. What does poking holes do? After the skin absorbs the vinegar, the holes will expand into fluffy bubbles when it cooks. The more holes you poke, the better. Make them very close together. You can also use a fork, but toothpicks are best. Toothpicks are sharper. We’ll poke holes into every part of the skin with toothpicks or a fork. How deep do you have to poke the holes? Not too deep, because the skin is not too thick. So through the skin? Yes, just go through the skin. Notice how he’s using two toothpicks to do it more quickly here. For restaurants, or 99 Ranch or Chinatown, when they're making this en masse, they can't sit there with a toothpick and poke all day, is there a tool that they use to roll across and get a lot of holes at once? They use a steel tool. A lot of thin nails together. so they can poke many holes at once. We gotta get one of those. After we’re done piercing the skin side thoroughly, we’ll flip over to the meat side. After poking the holes, cut three slashes along the bottom. Not too deep. Into thirds, like this. Why? This helps the flavor penetrate better. He’ll first score the meat lengthwise into thirds. This is how we'll cut it after cooking. Then he’ll score perpendicularly along the length to form squares. This is how it looks after cutting. If you wanna learn more about this scoring technique and Chinese knife skills, we’re super excited to invite you to the Canto Cooking Club, a membership where you’ll learn to cook and think just like a Cantonese chef. First off, Made With Lau is here to stay and we’ll still be sharing recipes & tips on YouTube every single week. So if memberships aren’t your thing, no pressure. But, for those of you who are super curious and passionate, if you want an expert to walk you through, step-by-step, how to master Cantonese cooking, then this might be perfect for you. In the Canto Cooking Club, we’re not just giving you recipes. For less than the cost of takeout, we’re distilling my dad’s 50 years of experience into organized, easy-to-follow classes, teaching you how to set up your kitchen, how to use a wok, how to craft & improvise with different flavors, and more. When you join, you get instant access to everything, and every month, you’ll get a new class to build on your foundation, with videos, printouts, and mastery recipes. It’s all on-demand, so you can learn at your own pace and not have to show up at specific times. Also, in our private community, you’ll get to connect directly with Daddy Lau, make new friends, and cultivate better cooking habits through our weekly challenges. So, if you want cooking to feel more effortless and intuitive, go to club.madewithlau.com or click the link in our description to sign up. After it's cut, we'll season it. How do we season it? With five spice powder! 1/2 a tsp. 1/3 tsp of black pepper. Then 1/4 tsp of white pepper powder. 1 tsp of garlic salt, and 1/2 tsp of salt. Mix it all up. Do you have to use five spice powder? Yes, that makes it aromatic. If you don't like five spice, of course you can omit it. That's fine. Once it's all mixed up, we'll rub it onto the pork belly. Use a spoon. Sprinkle it on. Get into the lines. Inside? Yes, get it inside. In any case, rub it thoroughly all over the pork belly. We’ll rub in the dry seasoning on just the meat side, making sure to get it into the gaps we just cut. It's covered in the spice rub. 2 tsp of ground bean sauce is enough. Add 1 tsp of sugar. You can't mix it into the spice rub? No. We'll paint it right on. Lots of people don't add this, but I like to. It'll taste even better. You can skip it. Just brush it on. With the ground bean sauce and sugar mixture, we’ll do the same, lathering just the meat side of the pork belly and getting it into the gaps as well. We have all of these ingredients listed on our blog at madewithlau.com along with step-by-step instructions and video clips to guide you as you make the recipe at home. After adding the marinade, get your aluminum foil out. Make a sort of dish to hold it. It should be longer than the meat. As long as it's bigger than the meat. Put in on your cutting board. Place the meat on the foil, skin side up. We’ll put our pork belly onto a large piece of foil with the skin side up. Make a sort of dish. You're not seasoning the skin? Not yet. We're going to work on that later, using vinegar. We’ll now fold the edges of the foil up to form a sort of dish around the pork belly. What's the purpose of folding it like that? Wrapping it up like this helps prevent the bottom from burning in the oven. It also preserves the juiciness at the bottom. So you'll put that whole thing in the oven? Yes! It goes into the oven like this. Now, we'll put it down onto the plate. We'll sprinkle some salt on top. Now, we’ll sprinkle some salt onto the skin and rub it all over. Salt draws out the moisture in the skin, resulting in a crispier final result when we cook it. A bit more salt. We’ll use a total of 1 tbsp of salt here. Now that we've put the salt on there, we'll soon see it draw the moisture out from the pork skin. It's already getting wet. It'll only take 5 minutes to draw all the moisture out. Would longer be even better? As long as you dry it out, it's fine. Now, we’ll wait 5 minutes for the salt to do its thing. It's all wet, see? Now, after finishing this process, wipe the salt off. After 5 minutes, we’ll wipe the salt off. Look, it's all wet. Scrape it all off. My dad uses a knife here to scrape off all the salt. Once it's dry, use this important item: vinegar! This is white rice vinegar. Now, we’ll pour on 1 tsp of white rice vinegar and spread it around to make sure it’s covering all the skin. What does the vinegar do? It makes the skin even crispier. Do other vinegars work? White vinegar would be best. Someone said, "I made it once and the skin was still so hard. What did I do wrong?" They needed to poke the holes better, and closer together. The skin didn't crisp up well. I used salt to draw out all of the moisture, right? The skin will crisp up better the more you dry it out. I also sprinkle vinegar on top at the end, and that really helps the skin get crispy. Vinegar gets rid of a bit of fat. Whether it's crispy chicken or roast duck, you need to put some vinegar on it. After adding the vinegar on top, we’ll need to refrigerate it to dry out the skin even more. Then, put this in the refrigerator for at least 10-12 hours. Let the skin dry out completely before roasting. That's how you get the skin crispy. So let's refrigerate it. We're putting it on the top shelf. because the vent is at the top of the fridge so the air will be stronger there. As my dad mentioned, the name of this dish is siu yuk, which literally means roasted meat. Like char siu, it belongs to the epic family of siu mei, which means Cantonese-style roasted meats. This dish uses the fatty cut of pork belly. "How do you identify high quality pork belly?" You can tell when you buy it. You'll see alternating layers of fat and muscle. We call it five-layered pork, because it has five layers. What he’s referring to is the Chinese name of this cut of pork, ng faa juk, which translates to five-flower or five-pattern meat. So when buying your meat, look for those luscious layers of fat & meat to create the perfect bite. Traditionally, these meats were painstakingly roasted on spits and open fires, but nowadays, it’s impossible to walk through a Chinatown without running into a Chinese BBQ shop with dozens of delicious roasted meats hanging by the window. Is there symbolism for this? The symbolism for this is just, it's good food. In our history, we didn't have a lot of meat to eat, so when you had a piece of pork or meat, you'd make it look good and taste good. Most of the time, we'd do this for someone's birthday, or New Year's and holidays. All right, friends! The pork has marinated overnight now. We'll take it out and get ready to roast it! After 10-12 hours in the fridge, we can take out our pork belly. As far as tools, we’ll need a baking pan and a rack that’ll fit into it. Today, we’re using a toaster oven, but an air fryer or conventional oven will work just as well. Having waited overnight, the skin is perfectly dry now. If you touch it, you can hear how dry it is, so it's ready to roast. First, we'll preheat the oven. We’ll preheat the toaster oven to 400°F (205°C). Heat up the oven to 400. I'm going to add some water to the pan. What does this do? If it gets too hot, the pork will burn. That's why we add water. About 1/2 a cup. Why is there a rack? We prop it up so that the bottom of the pork won't burn. Now, we'll put the pork belly onto the roasting rack. Set it nicely. Wait until the oven is fully at 400°F before putting the pork in. If you're using a full-size oven, you don't need to set it as high. 375°F would be fine. Our small toaster oven isn't as powerful. I use this toaster oven more often because I don't want to clean the big oven! I rarely bake. Would the timing be the same in a full-size oven? It should be about the same. Now that the oven is hot, we'll set it to 375°F. When the oven is done preheating, we’ll lower the temperature to 375° F (190° C). Great, that's 375°F Let's put the pork in. Now we’ll put the pork into the oven. Close the door. The first half of cooking time cooks the pork through. Then we'll raise the heat to crisp up the skin. After how long? 20-25 minutes. As a summary, we’ll cook the pork belly a total of about 1 hour. After preheating the toaster oven to 400°F (205°C), we’ll lower the temperature to 375°F (190° C) and put in our pork. After 20-25 minutes of cooking, we’ll turn up the heat to 425°F (218°C) and cook for another 30-35 minutes to crisp up the skin. For a conventional oven, you can lower the temperatures by 25°F respectively. These times are approximate and will depend on your particular oven. Definitely check on the skin 10-15 minutes before the end of the hour to make sure it’s perfectly crispy but not burnt. To be extra safe, you can use a meat thermometer to check if the interior is at the minimum temperature of 145°F (62.8°C) The pork belly's been roasting for an hour, let's take it out! Okay! Isn't that incredible? Follow my recipe for guaranteed results! Now, we can't cut it yet. Let it rest for 1 hour. Let it cool down and reabsorb the juices before cutting. If you cut it now, the juices will all flow out, and it won't be as tasty. "Can you freeze it after it's cooked?" You could refrigerate it for 2-3 days, if you're not eating it for a week, sure, you can freeze it. How would you thaw it? Just take it out and let it thaw. After we let our cooked pork belly sit for an hour, we can cut it. We can chop up our roasted pork belly now. See? Beautiful! You can hear how crispy the skin is. Let's start chopping it up. With a cleaver, we’ll first cut the pork belly into slices lengthwise along the already scored cuts. Wow, look! Oh, my god! Paddy from Patreon asked, "How do you keep the skin crispy when you store the leftovers?" Arrange the pieces neatly and roast them in the oven. Roast it to get the skin crispy again. Microwaving or steaming won't crisp it. Use an air fryer or an oven. Once we have long slices, we can lay them down and chop into smaller pieces like so. Now, let’s see just how crispy it really is. Crispy and crunchy! Oh, that's so good! Made With Lau ASMR... Our Crispy Pork Belly is roasted and chopped up. I hope everyone enjoys it! Cheers! Ooh, wow! This is so good! This is for sure one of the best I've ever had. Of all the crispy pork belly in Chinatown, Daddy Lau's is the best. Yeah, superior! We bow down! Thank you! YouTube thinks you’ll like this recipe next. Let's see if they're right. A huge thank you to our Wokstars and all our Chefs in the Canto Cooking Club.
