I love a bit of pork belly, but I don’t cook it at home that often. I’m not really sure why, but as soon as I taste that tasty, unctuous meat and get my teeth round that crackling, I vow to do it more often.

This recipe gives the belly the Eastern treatment using Szechuan pepper and Chinese five spice. Despite a lot of the fat rendering out during the cooking process, it’s definitely not the healthiest meat, but when it tastes as good as it does, who gives a toss.

Ingredients (serves 2)

For the pork

750g pork belly joint

1 tablespoon Szechuan pepper

1 teaspoon black pepper corns

1 teaspoon Chinese five spice

1 teaspoon sea salt

For the greens

200g baby pak choi

1/2 red chilli, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 tablespoon Light soy sauce

2 tablespoons water

6-8 Spring onions

Sesame oil

Vegetable oil

Method

First up, score the skin of pork belly all over in a diamond formation with as sharp a knife as you’re got. You want to cut through the skin, but not down to the flesh, around 3 millimeters deep.

Put a kettle on to boil, place your belly joint on a wire rack in your sink, and when it’s boiled, pour the water all over the pork’s skin. The skin will contract a bit making the scoring more prominent. Now pat the joint dry and set aside.

Pop a dry frying pan on the heat, and toast off the Szechuan and black pepper corns. When you can smell them, pour them in a pestle and mortar and grind into a powder. Now add the five spice and salt to the mortar and give it another grind to mix everything together.

Flip the belly joint over so it’s skin side down, and then rub the spice mix all over the pork meat. Set aside to marinate somewhere cool for at least 2 hours. You can leave it overnight in a fridge, but make sure the joint is at room temperature and check the skin is still dry before you cook it.

After a couple of hours, set your oven to 200 c and get your pork out. Some moisture will have leeched out of the meat, soaking into the spice rub. This is totally normal, and will help the rub stick. Now get a roasting tray which you can place a wire rack over and place the joint on the rack skin side up. Some of the rub will fall off, don’t worry about that. Now boil a kettle, pour the boiled water into the tray (avoiding getting the meat wet) until it is half full, and then put it in the oven.

Cook the joint for 20 minutes before turning the oven down to 180 and cook for another hour. Whilst the pork is cooking, cut the pack choi lengthways, slice the garlic and chop the clillies.

After an hour, take the pork out of the oven and remove from the rack. Turn the oven up as high as it will go, and then get your frying pan on the heat with a small amount of vegetable oil in it. When it’s good and hot, pop in the joint skin side up. You’re doing this to seal on the remaining spice rub to the bottom of the joint. After a minute, pop the joint back in the oven in the pan for 15 minutes.

Now cook your greens. Get a wok on the heat, add a few drops of sesame oil, a glug of vegetable oil and then fry the garlic and chilli. Before they brown, drop in the greens and stir fry for a couple of minutes, coating the veg with the oil. Then add the light soy sauce, water and cook for another couple of minutes.

You’re now ready to eat. Take the pork out of the oven, pop the greens in a bowl, cut the joint into chunks and serve straight away with steamed white rice.

Double happiness.

My day job takes me in to central London each day, and whilst I’m spoiled for choice for places to get lunch, I tire of giving the Prets and Eats my cash every day.  That being the case, a year or so ago my old work partner and I set ourselves on a bit of a mission to find some alternatives to the standard fayre, the results of which you can find on this map. I’ll be posting about some of the names on the list in the not too distant future, but first up I want to talk about Benito’s Hat.

No longer the preserve of stoned Californian students, the burrito has made it’s way to the UK (well London at least) and seems to be growing in popularity. I used to get my fix from an imaginatively named place called ‘El Burrito’ which promoted itself with a young Mexican kid dressed as a donkey (burrito means ‘little donkey’ in Mexican) handing out flyers, and then Benito’s Hat opened across the street. I think I went in there on the day it opened, and I’ve never darkened the donkey’s doorway since.

Based on Goodge Street, Benito’s hat has been open for a little over a year, and pretty much every lunchtime has a queue out of the door. It’s not hard to see why. The food is fresh, tasty and fast, and if you leave out the sour cream and cheese, probably not that unhealthy.

I’m a bit of a creature of habit, and always opt for a burrito with pork, black beans, hot sauce and guacamole (which costs an extra 50p – my only complaint). Once unwrapped from the foil, you know you’re in the presence of greatness. The tortillas are as soft and as warm as (I apologise for this analogy) a baby’s bum. Taking a bite you immediately get a hit of the seriously tasty stewed pork. Very similar to a ‘carnitas’ burrito you’d get in the states, the meat is intensely flavoured with lime, cinnamon, oregano and pepper black pepper. Then you taste the beans, then the heat of the chili sauce, before being soothed by the cool of the salad and guaca. The flavours are big and bold. It’s a seriously tasty and satisfying lunch.

I’ve tried other things on the menu, they’re all good, and would easily rival anything that you’d get in the Mission area of San Francisco, but I’m not sure that I’ve really done the experience justice here , so do yourself a favour if you’re in the ‘hood and eat like a Mexican this lunch time.

For the past couple of years my mate Ollie has been organising a hog roast, and last weekend was what has now been dubbed as ‘Hogfest 09′.

It’s basically a gathering for friends and family at his folk’s place in Shropshire, culminating in a hog roast. I know it all sounds a bit ‘River Cottage’, but for me escaping London and getting primal with a whole pig, a big fire and bunch of booze is my idea of a good weekend.  Ollie usually lives in Cairo where this kind of pork based entertaining doesn’t go down too well, so for him I think it’s also rare opportunity to feast on pork with impunity.

The preparation process is relatively simple. The pig gets scored all over with a Stanley Knife, given a good rub down with olive oil, and then sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper. No herbs or any other ‘fancy stuff’.

Cooking is a bit more complicated. The fire gets started at 5am, and then at 6 a barbecue pit of sorts is created using 2 sheets of corrugated iron, and by spreading the fire out into a hollow rectangular shape. The hog then gets mounted on a spit (bought on ebay and imported from the States no less)  and turned a quarter rotation every 5-10 minutes.

The fire’s heat should be more intense at the start to get the skin nice and crisp, this is pretty obvious when it happens, and then the rest of the cooking is slow and methodical. I think our pig was about 70 kilos and took around 12 hours to cook.

By 7pm (after a good half an hour resting) the meat was perfectly roasted. I had the honour of carving the beast, but after seeing it cook for so long my meat lust kind of took over and I went at it a bit like a demented cavemen butcher. It tasted amazing. Lovely salty crackling on top, sweet,  smokey, tender meat underneath. Totally worth the time and effort.

There are some more pictures of the lucky pig and the rest of the day here, and if you fancy doing it yourself there’s some ‘How To’ help here.