Porky Belly

It's Pork Belly, not porky belly, but that's what you end up with if you eat too much of this. This is the complete opposite of the lovely zingy oil-free salad I last posted up. To be honest, it's a little deviation from my usual diet too, and something I have never cooked before. It was made in honour of my brother, who was threatening not to come to lunch, but after watching him order it every time he saw it on a menu, I knew that as soon as he got the SMS saying "making porky belly n tiramisu - coming or not?" he'd be a cert.

Pork Belly is a super fatty cut of meat - it's cheap to buy ($20 for my 1.8kg cut, which fed seven), and easy to cook. It's the same cut that makes streaky bacon, pancetta, and side bacon. The fat keeps it moist, so it's almost impossible to muck it up - the only tricky part is the crackling, and... well, that's not really tricky at all (it's just about heat and salt).

Roast Pork with Italian Inspiration

I first tasted "porchetta" at a deli I worked in when I was 15. It was sold cold, and allthough I loved my mum's pork, it just surpassed everything she did (except of course for the crackling, because that's only a hot food thing). That was just the processed stuff. It came in a roll, vacuum packed, and we sliced it and sold it at $15.99 a kg.

Then this summer, I tasted the real thing in Cortona, Tuscany. It was sold off the bone - off the carcass to be truthful, and the scent of fennel, pepper and pork fat permiated the air like a pipe tone of the pied piper, leading me to its source in the belly of the Friday market (more about Cortona on this post here). This porchetta blew the other off the map.

This is my first attempt, and it's a cracker. Like everything I cook, it's easy, and relies on the quality of the ingredients. I chose a lovely neck of Free Range Otway Pork. Loins are fairly lean and look pretty, and sure, legs have a wonderful flavour, but the neck I find the most tender of all, and without a bone, it cooks quickly and evenly. Not only that, it's super cheap. The best thing was that the rind had been trimmed, removed and then tied back on, making perfect crackling a sinch.

Schnitzel

Before visiting Vienna (read my food path through old Vienna here) I had only had one great schnitzel in my life, and that was at the Tivoli Club, in Prahran, a German club with platter-sized schnitzel, cheap boutique beers and lederhosen to be enjoyed in the glow and tinkle of the inevitable poker machines that you always find in struggling Australian pubs and clubs. The schnitzel was to die for – it came about 15 different ways, in varieties of pork, turkey and veal, and with various flavours – Jäger, Zigeuner, Paprika, Käse, Rahm, or my favourite, Holstein – with fried egg, onions and capers. But to be honest, it’s really all about the schnitzel itself. It’s the kind of meat that every carnivore loves, including the super-fussy three-year-old kind of carnivore.

Ingredients:

• 500g lean meat, preferably pork or veal 
• 2 eggs 
• splash of water 
• ½ cup plain flour 
• salt and pepper 
• 1 ½ cups breadcrumbs 
• oil for pan-frying (canola best)

Barbecued Pork Tenderloin

five spice

You know that smell when you walk down a Chinatown strip - sort of sweet and gamey - honey and spice and smoke and roasting meat? Part of it is Peking Duck, and the other part is Barbecued Pork. It's one of ten key smells in the world that makes me hungry, even if I'm so full I can barely waddle (along with things like Sri Lankan curried eggplant, fresh bread etc, etc.)

Now the real stuff has things like maltose and shaoxing wine in it, involves cooking a caramel sauce, then marinating overnight and then cooking pork belly for about 45 minutes. Funnily enough, it doesn't even involve a "barbecue"...

My version has umpteen less ingredients, uses a very lean cut of meat, and cooks in 10-15 minutes.