Extraordinary Recipes

Slow-Cooked Pork Ribs with a Maillard-Reaction Crust

This baby’s got it all – it’s monstrously delicious, easy and cheap, yet relatively spectacular. It’s got the unctuousness that comes from slow-cooking a relatively fatty hunk of pork, but also the heady deliciousness from your friend and mine, the Maillard Reaction. It’s an absurdly cheap piece of meat, and it’s also great cold, so buy one from the most expensive, most arcane breed you can find, and get the biggest piece you can fit in your house.

3Kg	Pork belly (complete with skin and bones)
15	Dried bay leaves
5	thumbs of Ginger – a few thumbs
15	cloves garlic – or as much as you can handle
150ml	Olive oil
	Black pepper
	Salt (lots)
Optional:	_ handful whole star anise _ handful cardamon.

·0	Score the skin of the pork with a Stanley knife (your butcher will do this for you if you ask nicely)
·1	Combine all of the other ingredients in either a food processor or a pestle and mortar, then rub them well into the skin of your belly (the pork’s – not your own)
·2	Leave it somewhere cool to marinate for as long as you can bear (between 1hr and 2 days).
·3	Preheat your oven to 110 deg C (225F)
·4	Roast for 3 hours.
·5	Check to make sure it’s not pink. If it is, give it a bit longer.
·6	Lastly, for your Maillard Reaction, whack the oven up to 250C for 15mins (or use your grill if the oven’s unreliable)
·7	Let the belly rest, but not for more than 10 mins, then serve with roasted potatoes.
·8	Die Happy.

Read about the nonsense of the ‘searing’ myth

Send your unusual recipes to research@thegastronaut.com, saying why you like them. I’ll add the best ones to this page.

 

 

 

 

Ó Stefan Gates 2005