Hey guys,

this week, I wanted to try something with pork belly. I really love pork belly at a barbeque. Just cut them into thick slices, put them on the grill and I’ll eat 10 of them.

But for this week’s Hive Top Chef Competition held by @qurator (theme: Pork Belly) I’m going to cook a pork roast with crackling.

And no joke, I had to buy a new roasting pan for this dish, because my „old“ roasting pan is too big for my oven, which is only 50 cm wide instead of 60 cm. I never had any problems with roasts before, because I put them into a roasting bag. But for the pork roast, a roasting pan was needed and I wanted to upgrade my cooking tools anyway. I just have to get rid of my old roasting pan (which is still in its packaging.)

Let’s get cooking.

Ingredients

• The indispensable ingredient is meat :o). A thick, juicy pork belly with a slick of fat, rind, and bones. You need 1000g of this fine meat.
• 2 teaspoons of salt
• about a teaspoon of sugar
• three-quarters of freeze-dried thyme
• 1 ½ teaspoon of sweet pepper powder 
• 1/3 teaspoon of smoke-dried paprika powder
• 1 liter of hot water
• 1 big red onion
• 1 big white onion
• 1 small carrot
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 small parsley root
• 1 yellos, red and green paprika
• 1 tablespoon of vegetable broth powder

I washed the pork belly under a cold stream of water. You don’t want to have some kind of germs from the supermarket or the local butcher on your food.
After that, I patted the meat dry and put it aside.

I poured a liter of water into the roasting pan and brought it to a boil. I put the pork belly in with the rind facing downwards.

As the pork belly slowly simmers in the roasting pan to open its pores, I scraped the carrots and parsley root (has nothing to do with parsley, but it has a similar smell). I put parsley on the photo for you to see, that these two ingredients are totally different. Parsley root is similar to a root vegetable called parsnip. It basically looks and tastes the same.

I then diced the carrots and parsley root as well as the three paprikas, the onions and the garlic.
You eat with your eyes first and for that reason, I prepare my food in little bowls, before I mash them up in a pan or a pot, as you can see in the picture below.

After I prepared all vegetables, it was time to take the pork belly out of the pan, pour the water away and cut the rind in diamond-shape.

I mixed the salt, sugar, thyme and both varieties of paprika powder and put my massage gloves on :o).

Then I massaged the seasoning into the rind and the rest of the pork belly. I hope, you can see or surmise, I put a lot of love into it. My pork belly had a wonderful and proper salt and pepper massage before it was put in the oven.

Then I poured all vegetables into the pan, put a tablespoon of vegetable broth powder in and poured enough hot water (a water boiler is great for that) afterwards for the vegetables to be completely covered.