I looked at many recipes on the web, and eventually followed this one (with small changes) and the result was absolutely great. Perhaps even better than many of the Chinese BBQ shops that I know in Edmonton.
First, I found some pork belly with the skin on from Mountain Sausage. I followed the recipe for skin preparation and also the rub, though the rub was perhaps a little too salty. Next time I will reduce that by 1/2.
Here is the setup I had for roasting: meat on a cake rack, and then a drip pan on the bottom.
I roasted the meat 5 minutes more than indicated by the recipe because the meat thermometer
still says 110F after 20 minutes. Then I switched to broil. You can see that the skin is just starting to blister.
I followed the advice from the recipe and broil the meat until the skin is actually almost completely charred. Because the oven perhaps is a little bit uneven, I rotated the meat a few times. At the end, there were still a couple of spots that were not charred. This is easily fixed with a creme brulee torch. This is what it looks like at the end:
Then the burnt parts are scrapped off with a knife, leaving a reddish crispy skin.
Perhaps I didn't leave enough space between the drip pan and the rack, so the seasoning paste at the bottom was still quite wet. I put everything on a nonstick pan to heat up and dry out a little bit:
After resting it for 15 minutes, I sliced the pork into strips:
and then chopped into pieces:
At the end it was a great success. The skin was crispy even after a day, and the flavor was almost right except that it was slightly too salty. The meat was tender too. Definitely will try to do that again.
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