You can’t best a good roast pork belly. The lovely thick layer of fat on pork belly keeps the meat moist as it roasts and also gives you an incredible even layer of delicious crackling.

Still a relatively cheap cut, pork belly is simple to prepare and will impress your dinner guests for sure.

Ingredients:

• 1.5kg pork belly
• Rock salt & freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 onions, peeled, and halved
• 2 carrots, peeled and halved lengthways
• 2 sticks of celery, chopped in half
• 1 bulb of garlic, skin on, broken into cloves
• Small bunch of fresh thyme, leaves picked
• 600ml water or stock

Preheat the oven to its hottest temperature, it needs to be at lest 220°C

Place the pork on a clean work surface, skin upwards. Score the skin at about 1 centimetre intervals, making sure you only cut through the skin not into the meat.

Rub the skin of the pork belly with plenty of salt and olive oil.

Season the underside of the meat with a little salt and ground black pepper. Place the pork, skin-side-up, in a roasting pan, and place in the hot oven.

Roast for 1/2 an hour until the skin of the pork has started to puff up and you can see it turning into crackling. Turn the heat down to 180°C and set the timer for 1 hour.

Take out of the oven and add all of the vegetables to the pan and stir them into the fat. Place the pork on top of the vegetables and place back in the oven. Roast for 1 hour further.

Remove the meat and cover to rest while you make the gravy.

Add the water or stock to the pan, and place on the element – bring to the boil and simmer for a few minutes, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. Use a potato masher and mash the roasted vegetables to get as much flavour as you can from them into the gravy.  Make sure you taste the gravy and add a little salt and pepper if it needs it. Pour the gravy through a sieve, mashing the vegetables with the back of a spoon

Serve with mashed potato, and freshly steamed vegetables – the low carb  option is to ditch the potatoes and have creamy cauliflower  mash instead.

As delicious as this was, there are left-overs! Pork belly is a high fat meat, perfect for the Ketogenic diet which is low carb and healthy fats – even so a girl does not need seconds as much as she would have liked to have indulged 🙂

I’m thinking the left-overs could do well in Pulled-Pork Nachos ? or maybe Sweet and Smoky Pulled Pork Quesadilla’s? I don’t think it will be a problem to devour the left-overs – the problem will be choosing how!

Happy roasting xx