Smoked Pork Belly
3 hours Recipe Yield:
1.3 kg Difficulty:
Medium recipe
Smoked Pork Belly Recipe
Smoked pork belly - a recipe of Ukrainian cuisine, for this recipe it is better to choose not pure salo, but with layers of meat - pork belly. Before smoking, pork belly should be well salted in saline with the addition of garlic and onions. After salting, the salo must be dried for another day, and then smoked. According to this recipe, you can make hot smoked pork belly. For smoking salo at home, it is best to use cherry sawdust, it gives a special flavor.
You can also add juniper twigs or sawdust - they will enhance the aroma of smoked pork belly and give it a more interesting taste. If you do not have a smoker at home, you can make one from improvised kitchen utensils. Pour sawdust into a deep brazier, put a grate, preferably on high legs, place the product for smoking on the grate, cover with a lid and put everything on fire. It will turn out a home-made analogue of a smokehouse for hot smoking.
Recipe Ingredients
Cooking Recipe
To cook a recipe of Ukrainian cuisine smoked pork belly, cut the product into layers of approximately 8x25 cm. Wash the pork belly well and, if necessary, scrape the skin.
In a deep bowl, mix salt with water and put on fire. Bring the saline solution to a boil, put the pork belly in it and cook for 3 minutes.
Randomly chop the onion and garlic, put it in a vessel in which the pork belly will be salted. Put the pork belly skin side down on top of the garlic and onion and pour over the salt solution. Cover the jar with a lid and put salt for 5-7 days.
If during cooking the pork belly begins to curl up a little, when putting it into a vessel, put a wooden plank or sticks on top of the lard, cover with a lid and put a load on the lid. Until the moment of complete salting, the pork belly will straighten out.
Salted pork belly must be removed from the vessel, put on a wire rack or hung up and dried. One day will be enough for drying the pork belly.
Well, the day has come when pork belly can be smoked. Prepare sawdust in advance, preferably from cherries or other fruit trees, and if you can find juniper, you are very lucky.
If the pork belly is hung with hooks in the smokehouse, it must be hooked on the layers of meat - so the pork belly will hold securely during smoking. Smoke pork belly pretty quickly, longer to prepare. The aroma of smoked meats will scatter not only around your apartment, but also your neighbors will get it. After 1.5-2 hours, the pork belly will be well smoked. But that's not all.
You don’t need to eat smoked pork belly right away - you need to cool it, you can even put it in the freezer, and only when smoked pork belly cools down and change its structure, it can be cut and served at the table.