SLOW SMOKED BELLY PORK

You won’t get a better crowd pleaser than a joint of belly pork, smoked low and slow over coals and infused with the rich, robust flavour of oak wood. It’s also incredibly easy to create. All you need is a little time – 4 or 5 hours ideally – but once you’ve set up this smoking project you can leave it running whilst you get on with other things. Belly pork is a great value cut and can be picked up at the supermarket, your local butcher or farmshop. Although it’s generously layered with fat, it’s the fat which slowly renders during cooking magically boosting flavour and succulence.

1. Score the skin side with a criss cross design, dry carefully, baste with the olive oil and rub in the salt crystals. Prepare your BBQ or smoker. We used a coconut briquette which burns very slowly delivering a low level heat, ideal for this type of low and slow cooking. For the same reason we used oak smoking chunks. Just two or three are needed and they will smoulder away on the grey coals gently releasing their smoke flavour over time. You won’t need to add any more as the smoke is mostly infused during the early part of cooking and if you did top up with more, the result could be just too smoky. You can use lumpwood, but you may find that it burns a little too hot and quickly, but some ventilation adjustment will slow things down. You can also use smoking chips, but you would need to protect them in a smoker box or double layer foil pouch.

2. Allow your BBQ or smoker temperature to stabilise and the coals go grey hot with no open flame. You are looking for a cooking temperature of around 90 to 100 degrees C – so really quite low. You can cook at lower temperatures still, just for longer. Place your pork joint into the smoker and leave it to smoke and cook very gently

3. Check back in on progress after a couple of hours. The pork will have taken on some colour from the smoke and the meat side should still feel springy. You might need to top up your heat source at this point and using a Charcoal Chimney Starter accessory is a great way to establish your coals separately and then add to your smoker or bbq once they are at the correct temperature. This minimises interruption to the cooking process and helps regularise the low temperatures you need.

4. After 5 hours, the pork should be cooked but not tough and dried out. The internal safe cooked temperature of pork is around 70 degrees C, but this method of long, slow exposure to a low heat should give you a cooked-through result. You will also see some wonderful pinky smoke halos from the oak wood smoke absorption. The fat should have slowly rendered through the meat, relaxing the meat fibres and effectively ‘slow marinading’ for a juicy result. The outer skin layer should also be dry and crispy. You can crisp up further in an oven, though would recommend removing from the meat to do this. We think it’s lovely left in place.

5. Cube up the pork (or slice if preferred) and enjoy – to some applause hopefully – with an array of BBQ favourites and an unctuous BBQ sauce – a perfect match is Angus & Oink’s PitBoss sauce.