Recipe for confited pork belly
Tender, juicy, and delicious meat – slow-cooked in duck fat.
Do you know the feeling when you’re reading a cookbook or visiting a food blog and you see a recipe and think, I just have to try that? That’s how I felt when I saw a recipe from Madsvin for pork belly slow-cooked in oil a few years ago. At home, we love duck fat and stock up on it in large quantities when it’s on sale. We use it, among other things, to fry potatoes in duck fat or to include in the sous vide bag when preparing pork cheeks.
I often buy pork belly from my local butcher and typically ask him to debone it for me. However, this time I forgot, so I had to tackle the deboning with my own knife. Did you know that butchers practically have a deboning razor blade – they shave the bones off in no time? He’s been kind enough to show me, and I definitely need to own one of those knives at some point 🙂
The belly was cut into 2 parts, with one part obviously used for homemade dry-cured bacon and the other half used for experiments; half was used for this recipe and the other half had a go in the sous vide water bath.
Therefore, it was naturally fitting to try making pork belly confit in duck fat.
As with everything in my private kitchen, I simply can’t follow a recipe to the letter and have to put my own twist on it.
This time, I only made a small piece since I was using the pork belly for several things. You can easily make it with a larger piece, just use a bit more of the spice mix and duck fat (which, of course, can be substituted with a neutral-tasting oil, such as canola or sunflower oil).
Ingredients
- 1 pcs. Pork Breast Boneless. Mine was about 600 grams. But the weight doesn't matter much, so you can easily make a whole pork belly up to 2.5 kg without problems
- 3 gram Herbes de Provence spice mix of, among other things, thyme, rosemary, marjoram, oregano, etc.
- 6 gram Cumin
- 36 gram Salt
- 4 gram Sugar
- 2 gram Pepper from the grinder
- 1 kg Duck Fat can be replaced with 1 liter of oil
- 0.5 l Oil
Instructions
- Mix the spices well and rub them thoroughly into the meat.
- Place it in a bag (preferably a vacuum bag) and refrigerate for at least a day. Mine ended up with about 26 hours - it just needs to fit into your own logistics.
- Take the meat out of the bag and rinse it thoroughly with cold water to remove all the spices and stop the "curing".
- Place the meat in a heatproof dish, cast iron pot, or other oven-safe container. I actually ended up using a small loaf pan, as my piece of meat wasn't that large.
- Now the meat needs to be covered with fat so it can be confited. I melted my duck fat and added it. Since I was a bit short to fully cover the meat, I also added a little rapeseed oil.
- Cook the meat for 10 hours at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) regular oven.
- Now it's time to press the meat. If you (like me) are using a loaf pan, you can advantageously pour off the fat (not down the sink, but for example into a milk carton, so it can be easily discarded) and place another loaf pan of the same size on top. Put something heavy on the pan, such as 2 bottles of wine and refrigerate for at least 12 hours. An alternative is to carefully take it out of the dish/pan/pot and place it on a cutting board with another cutting board on top and again something heavy on top.
- When it's time to serve the meat, you "just" need 15 minutes, and you can advantageously do it just before serving.
- Heat a pan and add some of the leftover duck fat or oil/ghee to the pan and heat it on medium-high (on my stove it's 10 out of 14).
- Cut the meat into squares and score the rind if necessary.
- Place the meat with the rind side down. After 5 minutes, it will start to splatter a bit, so be careful - especially if you have small children in the house. Fry until the rind is crispy and the meat is warm - it took 15 minutes for me.
