🍜 Extras: Lemongrass porchetta

it's simpler than you think...

Earlier this week, I shared a recipe for “waterfall” mushrooms, where king oyster mushrooms are tossed with a lemongrass and coriander paste, grilled, and dressed with the flavours of waterfall beef, a traditional Thai salad. Recently, we had our first guests of the year over for lunch—Phi-Yen, author of the cookbook Ăn Cơm and this thịt kho trứng guest-post, and her partner. I wanted to prepare a lemongrass porchetta using a similar paste as the pork marinade, as these are flavours that I knew she would appreciate.

Prepping the pork belly
While some cooks prepare porchetta with a combination of loin and belly, all-belly porchetta is way simpler and removes all anxiety over the cooking times of the different cuts of meat. I started by rubbing the pork belly all over with coarse sea salt to exfoliate the rind and remove any impurities. I then rinsed it and patted it dry with paper towels. Vendors typically torch the stiff bristly hairs on pork belly to get rid of them, but sometimes you’ll still find several; you can simply pull them off the rind with a pair of fish tweezers. It is sometimes recommended to score the pork rind to create channels for steam to escape and for fat to render. However, I have found that even without scoring the rind, I get great results, so I don’t usually bother with this step.

One tip that I’ve learnt recently is to butterfly the pork belly like a book: lay the pork belly with its longest side facing you and, with a knife, split the pork belly in half beginning from your dominant side. This increases the surface area of the meat that is in contact with the marinade and looks spectacular when the meat is rolled up, roasted, and sliced.

Roll the pork belly up tightly from one end to the other like a Swiss roll and secure it with twine. Once tied, place the roulade on a wire rack set over a tray, and place this uncovered in your refrigerator overnight. This allow air to circulate all around the pork and dries out its rind, key to achieving a puffy skin.

Roasting the porchetta
The principles for making crispy pork belly still apply here—a period of low-and-slow cooking to fully tenderise the pork, break down collagen in the skin, and further dry out the rind; followed by an intense blast of heat to puff it up. Here are shots of the porchetta before and after its overnight rest in the refrigerator and 4 hours of roasting in the oven:

Once the pork belly is tender and the rind is sufficiently dry, the pork rind is ready to be puffed. Puffing happens when there is only a small amount of residual moisture in the skin. When this dried pork skin is exposed to intense heat, this moisture turns to steam and pushes outward, thus causing the skin to puff up into a light, airy crackling. Since our tiny apartment oven couldn’t get hot enough to puff the skin, I improvised by heating oil to its smoke-point and ladling it over the pork, which worked perfectly.

We chopped up the porchetta and enjoyed it in tacos alongside accompaniments of guacamole, pico de gallo, esquites, black beans, arroz rojo, and homemade flour tortillas. Coriander, being a key ingredient in Mexican food and in the porchetta marinade, served as a natural bridge between the traditional sides and the porchetta. Few dishes lend themselves better than sharing with friends and eating with your hands!

RECIPE
Makes 4 to 6 servings