Chinese pork belly recipe

Sticky Chinese Belly Pork – Slow-cooked until meltingly tender and then finished with a spicy sticky glaze.

I told you I’d be back with more sticky.

Sticky sea bass, sticky chicken, sticky cake glazes, sticky salmon and now this sticky pork belly. I’m all about the sticky. Just call me sticky Nicky.

Actually don’t. That sounds weird.

I sometimes like to kid myself and call it caramelized – like this ‘caramelized beef brisket‘. But at the end of the day, I just mean coated in some kind of sugar and then cooked until you reach the dark brown, shiny stage, creating an intense flavour that takes whatever you’ve just made to a whole new level. How could anything finished in that way not taste amazing?

Let’s pick a few random foods and see….

• Kale (love my kale): Yes that’d work
• Toast: Oh my god yes. That may even be better than French toast! Brown sugar caramelized toast with raspberries? Ok, I just sorted tomorrow’s breakfast.
• Chickpeas: Yeah, that could work as a beer snack
• Eggs: ok, you got me. That’s probably going to taste disgusting (unless we’re talking Cadbury crème egg that is)

For this recipe, the sticky layer is added right at the end. Don’t be fooled though. Just because the pork hasn’t been marinating for hours, doesn’t mean it’s not going to taste amazing (I confused myself with double negatives there, but I’m basically saying it tastes amazing even though we’re only glazing at the end).

This pork actually has three layers of flavour. The first coming from being slow-cooked in a pan (I use one