Bring Me Big Fat Fat
Pork belly as anything other than bacon is a pretty recent foodie fad in the US. In China, this cut of pork has been used to stew "red-braised meat" for as long as I can remember. While this name may seem apt due to the coloring, my childhood name for it is even more fitting in my opinion: big fat fat | 大肥肥. This dish is extremely easy to make and a crowd-pleaser, especially with the big fat fats! Oh no I didn't! All right, let's just get started.
Using your big scary knife, cut your side of belly into mini slabs. This is easiest to do when the meat is a little cold and the slabs will come out uniformly. Conversely, COLD MEAT IS COLD! Times like these you remember why you keep White Butcher Boyfriend around.
Get your pot preheated at this time over medium heat. I prefer to use a 3 1/2 quart dutch oven but any heavy-based pot will do. The next few steps happen quickly and (per the usual around here) come hand in hand with the fire alarm going off. If White Boyfriend isn't too busy running his cold, red hands under hot water, he can take care of that. The key is to get your garlic, ginger, and green onions all chopped up and ready to go.
Coat the bottom of your pre-heated pot with oil and quickly add sugar. At this point, I find it easiest to remove the pot from heat or else the sugar may burn. Stir the sugar until it's a lovely caramel color. Return to heat and add a layer of pork belly. This will splatter hot oil on your hands. Power through and keep your eye on the prize. After one side browns lightly, turn them over. You want to do this w/ the remaining pork belly, but because there are so many sometimes I get impatient and just throw them all in. No one will know--no one except those people at America's Test Kitchen who spend all day testing the difference in flavor between completely browning every piece of meat vs. not.
Throw in those chopped veggies now along with the dried spices. Stir a couple of times and add your liquid ingredients so that the meat is submerged. Cover, simmer, and relax, checking in on your meat every now and then to make sure the liquid hasn't all cooked off. This is more likely to happen if you're using a shitty pot, so don't be a cheapskate and go invest in a dutch oven.
When your meat looks like Step 4, it's ready for consumption. You can either spoon joyously over rice or you can step it up a notch. Pork belly buns | 刮包 (of Taiwanese origin) are a perfect way to fancy up this dish if you have guests coming. If those guests are Taiwanese, this is also a nice gesture to them that the mainland/islands can agree on something. You put on a nice dress, White Boyfriend vacuums the floor, and Big Fat Fat squeezes into a warm bun. Everybody wins.
For the straight-up red-cooked meat recipe, click here.