Chinese Roast Crispy Pork
Chinese crispy roast pork or siu yoke is one of the favourite roast meats from Chinese restaurants. It is surprisingly easy to make at home.
Servings 4 portions
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg A piece of skin on belly pork about 1kg to 1.5kg - size to suit number of servings.
- Salt
- 5 spice powder to taste
- white vinegar for the skin
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 200C/400F/gas 6.
- Wash and scrape the skin until clean. Use a sharp fork, a bunch of toothpicks or even the tip of a sharp knife and pierce the skin all over. This helps the fat under the skin to render when roasting. An even piercing will also result in nice even bubbles across the skin and not large blisters when roasting.
- Pour over a kettle of boiling water on the skin side of the belly pork and dry it. The boiling water tightens the skin and helps to make the skin crispy later.
- Rub about 1 -2 tsp of salt all over, on both the skin and the meat side.
- Make some shallow cuts on the meat side, about an inch apart. You will use these cuts as a guide to cut the finished roast pork. On the meat side, sprinkle and rub in 5 tsp of 5 spice powder all over making sure that you get some in the cut crevices.
- Leave the pork uncovered in the fridge overnight to dry out skin. This ensures that you get a good crispy skin.
- To roast, put the piece of bellypork, skin side up, on a wire rack over a pan of water. This will collect the fat that will be rendered out of the pork while roasting and stop the oil from splattering.
- Roast in a hot oven for 1 1/2 hours at 200C.
- After 1 hour, brush the skin side with vinegar and put the grill on in the oven as well and watch the skin blister. ( I use the grill and fan oven function for this stage). Let it roast in the oven for another half an hour. (watch out for smoke at this point as it can sometimes trigger the smoke alarm.)
- Once raosted and the skin is nicely blistered and golden brown, remove from the oven and rest for 30 minutes. Then cut into smaller pieces for presentations and serve.
- You should get a really crispy piece of Chinese Roast Pork with minimal effort.
Notes
Note: If you use a good free-range pork, the pork belly will not shrink as it hasn't had a lot of added water content. The resulting meat will also taste much better than a bog standard supermarket pork belly.