Pork Belly, Braised Sous Vide

Pork belly! Back in Slovenia we had no use for uncured bacon. We would cure it, smoke it, bake it, render it. Especially rendered bacon makes very prominent appearances in many Slovenian traditional dishes. All of them, of course, from the peasant times where it was key to consume enough energy. Not so much these days.

But then there is pork belly. Asians have figured out it is one of the tastiest things on the planet. I remember vividly when I had it for the first time, being somewhat suspicious of eating braised bacon. Then I learned that the texture was outright screaming awesomeness.

I have been experimenting with braising pork belly Korean style, and the results have been good enough that I "keep experimenting". When a sous vide circulator joined our kitchen arsenal, pork belly was on the short list of things to try. Let me describe first the sous vide approach, and then mention what to do if you have not splurged for a water oven.

First, you need pork belly. The meatier the better, and around here this means a trip to HanKook, the top Asian market in South Bay. I think I used about 1.5 to 2lb of pork belly. Pork belly likes to bathe in a pool of spices before one cooks it. I used about 2TB dried Korean red pepper powder, and about 2TB of Korean chili paste, about 1 TB or so of garlic powder, a good sprinkling of salt, say 1tsp or so, about 1TB of sesame oil, and about 2 TB of rice vinegar. I mixed the spices in a plastic bag, added pork belly that I cut into three chunks to fit the bag nicer, and then I vacuum-sealed the bag.

Pork belly after 48 hours at 144F

Tip: When vacuum sealing a bag with wet ingredients, I always use the manual mode and pulse the pump carefully. This way I extract most of the air, yet I can make sure the liquid is not sucked out, clogging the pump.

I let the pork belly marinate in the fridge for about a day. At least a few hours is the minimum.

I cooked pork belly in 144F water bath for 48 hours. A couple of hours more or fewer doesn't make any difference, so no need to panic if it is 10pm and you want to eat pork belly in two days for an early supper.

After 48 hours, the pork belly looks kind of odd. It is not obvious it is cooked, yet it is quite clear that it is not raw. I am a bit sad I didn't take a picture of the pouch in which the pork belly was cooked. You could see that a good amount of fat, but not all, got rendered out. Will it be dry?

Torched pork belly looks much more appetizing

To make pork belly look respectable, one either needs to blast it in the oven, or under the broiler, or one needs to attack it with your handy torch. After drying the meat with a paper towel, I reached for the torch. The visual change after torching is always a surprise to me.

I tend to torch things in a cast-iron skillet. It is very unlikely the skillet will catch fire. A wood cutting board is a surprisingly good choice as well.

Once the pork belly looks that good, the only thing one can really do is slice it and consume it promptly. I seasoned the sliced pork belly with a touch of sesame oil, and I served it with a 50:50 mixture of brown rice and black rice, that I cooked slowly in vegetable stock. Then I got adventurous and added a few slices of avocado. The effect was shockingly sublime. The rice had a touch of chewiness to it, the avocado was is usual buttery-yet-somewhat-plain self, and the pork belly had just enough of spiciness to it that it paired beautifully with avocado and rice. I was not sure about the interaction of two very rich and smooth textures, but it turned out that avocado helped the pork belly reach the full potential of melting in your mouth.

As much as I like pork belly, I can only consume a few slices. What should one do with leftovers? I only torched the pork belly that I was about to slice, and the rest found itself in a plastic container in our fridge. When I wanted to consume the rest, I could have re-heated it in a sous-vide bath to 130F, and then I would repeat the pyrotechnic exercise. I was more in a hurry, so simply sliced the meat and reheated it in at a medium heat in a cast-iron pan. As long as you don't overheat it, the deliciousness will stay around.

Pork belly braised in the oven and then crisped in a pan

What to do if one does not have sous vide equipment? Start by marinating the pork the same way as for sous-vide cooking. Before braising, bake the port belly at 350F for 30 minutes, this will firm up the meat a bit.

In the meanwhile prepare the braising liquid. I like to use tomato paste dissolved in a 2-3 cups of water, some red wine, garlic, and the omnipresent Korean red pepper powder, a tablespoon or so. Add a tsp or so of salt. Do taste the liquid to see what it does for you! Optionally you can add some sugar and soy sauce, just make sure you adjust the amount of salt if you use soy sauce. Add the pork to the braising liquid, bring to simmer, and braise in the oven at 325F for 2 hours or until fork tender. Or simply have it simmer on the stove top for 2h or until fork tender.

Before serving, dry the pork belly with a paper towel and either crisp it up in a hot oven, or perform my favorite activity and torch it. I like torching because it crisps the surface, but the heat does not penetrate deep as it does in the oven. You can also crisp the meat in a hot cast-iron pan.

Pork belly cooked the traditional way will melt in your mouth and you will be temporarily transported to taste-bud heaven. Sous vide, however, elevates that to a level I was not aware existed until I gave it a try.

Coffee, freshly roasted

Summary:

• Preheat the oven to 430F (220C). I use an oven steel and let it preheat for an extra 10 minutes.
• Evenly spread green coffee beans on a paella pan or baking sheet lined with parchment
• Put the paella pan or the baking sheet in the oven, turn the vent hood on
• After 25 minutes, take the coffee from the oven, let it cool
• Optional: Clean away the chaff - I put it in the colander, rub the beans, and as I toss them I gently blow the chaff away.
• Preferably let the coffee air for about two days before using.

Clearly, my most significant achievement is drinking NO coffee while completing PhD and launching Google Music Store. Telling ya, that was all done without any performance-enhancing substances!

One sunny morning Jasna and I found ourselves eating breakfast at Coffee Shack in Captain Cook area of Hawaii. We were told that Coffee Shack was known for its excellent breakfast and for a spectacular view, and I can confirm that both were true, we went back several times. A waiter comes and asks us whether we would like some coffee. I acted as my usual self, put my nose up, and declared I did not drink coffee, and asked for tea. Jasna tends to be smarter than me, so she asked whether the name Coffee Shack meant that they had good coffee. She did the homework and knew about Kona coffee. I just tagged along.

The waiter smiled and pointed to the steep slope just under the restaurant: "Yes, we have good coffee. It comes from our plantation right here!" Jasna ordered coffee, she barely prevented me from drinking all of it, and that was it. The flavor was strong, yet smooth and not bitter, very pleasantly complex. Quite a difference from the awful bitterness people drank back in Slovenia. We became coffee drinkers, and by the time we returned home, Amazon already delivered a coffee-making apparatus.

It turned out that friendly folks at Coffee Shack are very happy to sell you their coffee beans, and that they even do mail order. We have been loyal customers - we consume very little coffee, so we decided to go with the very best. Recently, our friends Rok and Ying visited, told us about a freshly roasted coffee in a local Ethiopian restaurant called Walia, and how they learned one could buy green coffee beans from Selam Market in Campbell. For quite some time I have been tempted to try to roast coffee, but I never really crossed the threshold of looking for the beans. I went to Selam Market the next day and returned with a large bag of green beans. I expected a lengthy trial and error process, so I thought I better stocked up. 

Green coffee beans spread on the baking sheet

Here is what green coffee beans look like, this is about 5oz. I asked my friend Google to point to instructions for roasting coffee beans and I found quite a lot of pretty consistent information. Pretty much everyone recommends to get a popcorn maker and use that for roasting beans, and some even recommend using a heat gun! Many people describe in detail the transformation of coffee during the roasting process. It all looks very doable, but it does require practice and it all seems to be error prone, even if one purchases a dedicated coffee roaster.

I gave it a try and roasted coffee in my wok on the stove top. Those web sites were not joking, the transformation is really interesting. The coffee about doubles in size, it makes cracking sounds in two places in the process. The amount of smoke generated surprised both me and our fire alarm. Of course, I roasted at too high heat for too long and ended up burning the beans. Oh well. I discarded that batch promptly and tried again, this time being much more careful. This time the result was quite uneven, but the coffee that I brewed from those beans was very good. 

The unevenness and the anticipated lack of consistency made me consider shopping for a popcorn maker, or even a dedicated coffee roaster. Remember, tools are good!!! Argh!!!! ... said Tim the tool man. Then something clicked. Everyone was recommending to roast at a very high temperature, yet some listed average internal coffee temperature for different stages or styles of roasting. So being a researcher and all I thought - all one really needs to do is to bring the internal temperature to what it should be, and my oven very happily heats up to the desired temperature.

Coffee after half and hour at 435F

An experiment started. I set my oven to 435F convection, spread the beans on a baking sheet, and put the sheet in the oven. I did use parchment paper simply because I like to use parchment instead of cleaning the baking sheet. I decided I would roast the beans for about 20 minutes after the oven reached 435F, and in the subsequent experiments I converged to 26 minutes at 442F. I also remembered to turn on the ventilator in the range hood, which proved to be a good move. I was curious what would happen, because Sweet Marias, the Cadillac of sources for green coffee beans, claimed one needed a perforated baking sheet to allow movement of the air, and that roasting in the oven would produce uneven results. But they roasted at 500F for 15-20 minutes. 

Coffee bean chaff, removed

I was surprised with how evenly the coffee was roasted. In the picture you can see how much chaff is attached to coffee beans. So the next task was to remove the chaff. I happen to have two metal colanders, so I transferred the coffee in to one and after it has cooled down enough to handle with hand, I started to stir and rub the beans. And when I got bored with that, I would pour the beans from one colander to another. I read about that in one of the web sites. I suggest one does that over a sink, unless you enjoy your place to be super messy.

Cleaned coffee

I found out that the chaff goes away quite easily, but not completely. Here is what the result looks like. See how some chaff is still in the cracks? I decided the chaff would be filtered away when I was making coffee, so not a second of sleep was lost due to my coffee not looking exactly as clean as the coffee from Coffee Shack.

With some more experimenting I decided that the coffee really does need to degas and that the peak flavor develops in about two days after roasting. Your personal preference will come in play here.

Our excellent retro-grinder

Let me quickly describe how we make coffee: We use a hand-cranked ceramic burr grinder one can get for $35-$45 on Amazon. It takes about a minute to grind two scoops of coffee beans, which is Jasna's and mine combined daily consumption. An electric grinder of equivalent quality would be several hundred dollars, and it would consume tons of our non-existent counter space. So we went old-fashioned, much to a surprise of our guests, who, I am sure, find us a little quirky, yet tend to appreciate the quality of coffee, and the meditative aspect of the brewing process :-)

Ground coffee in the upper chamber

For the brewing, we use a siphon where we replaced the original cloth filter with a glass rod Corey filter one can get on eBay. It is much easier to clean than the cloth filter, and people say that cloth traps some of the coffee oils. Speaking of clean-up, I clean the siphon in about one minute, and I am still puzzled with people complaining it is a lot of effort.

The way the siphon works is very neat. One places the ground coffee in the upper chamber of the siphon with the filter already in place. Then you set the upper chamber in the stand so that you can fill the water in the lower chamber.

I always fill the bottom chamber with boiling water because it takes quite some time for the water to heat up. I read that some people believe pre-boiling the water deprives it of oxygen, which results in inferior coffee. The scientist in me has a difficult time believing such a claim, the water boils one way or another. 

Siphon with the water pushed up

When the water is in the lower chamber one sets the top chamber on top of the bottom chamber, creating an air-tight seal. The whole contraption then goes on the stove burner at a medium heat. As the air in the bottom chamber heats up and expands, it pushes the liquid to the top chamber. At that point it is good to lower the heat a bit. Apparently the siphon keeps the water at exactly the right temperature for coffee brewing, a few degrees under boiling. Moreover, some of the air is pushed from the bottom chamber, and that air creates bubbles that mix the ground coffee with the liquid continuously.

We brew our coffee for 2.5 to 3 minutes. When one removes the contraption from the stove, the air in the bottom chamber starts to cool down. That creates vacuum, which sucks the liquid from the top chamber back down. The glass rod has an uneven surface, which acts as a filter, so no coffee grounds make it to the bottom chamber.

Air bubbling in the top chamber

I learned the hard way that the coffee should not be ground super finely. One time the glass filter clogged up and the force of the vacuum broke the glass in the bottom chamber. Thankfully, a replacement was not hard to find. It took me a while, though, to formulate a guess (or should I say hypothesis) for what happened. 

The resulting coffee tends to be very smooth and clean. I really like it that there are no filters to throw away. Most of all, the whole process is like a lab experiment and I always loved to do those. There are much prettier-looking siphons out there, and one day we will acquire one to appropriately wow ourselves, and our visitors. 

Coffee back in the bottom chamber

One of these days I intend to try pour-over coffee, which some say is the superior way of making coffee. But that will take the time as it seems that one needs to carefully experiment. Maybe coffee is not such a trivial thing after all :-)

Update, March 2022

I continue to roast our coffee and have settled on Sweet Maria's as my source. Ethiopian coffee remains my favorite. With our new oven I adjusted the roasting temperature to 430F (about 220C). I have replaced the syphon with pour over as the preparation method of choice. I use the water at 200F, and the coffee to water ratio of about 1:17 - for a gram of ground coffee I use 17g water. That may sound excessively finicky, but using a scale is quick, helps with consistency and predictability, and it also prevents me from overflowing my cup. The most significant upgrade has likely been the coffee grinder as I switched to 1ZPresso JX with a remarkable difference in grinding speed, uniformity of the grind, and of course coffee flavor.

A much improved coffee grinder

Sweet Maria's was kind enough to include their roasting card in my latest order. Here are the photos - they do demonstrate that coffee roasting is quite easy.

Smooth start of the day

Recently a friend asked me what blender she should get and mentioned that VitaMix seemed popular, yet it was somewhat extravagant. That matched precisely how I felt several years ago when our blender decided it had made its last smoothie. In our quest to find a replacement, we purchased three or so different blenders, climbing up the price range ladder, and returned them all. The worst was a fatal engineering flaw causing the bottom of the jar to unlock at the worst possible moment. Too bad that I didn't take a picture of strawberry smoothie decorating our kitchen counter and our kitchen floor. Another one had blades so dull that the smoothies came out stringy.

At that point we reached a moment when nothing but extravagance was an option. I ordered a commercial version of VitaMix over Ebay. The reason I went with the commercial option was that it supposedly had better sound proofing, and a more powerful motor.

I am sure you are wondering why ear muffs appear in the picture! I opened up the blender and looked hard for any evidence of sound proofing, and I am yet to find any. My experience with friend's VitaMix tells me that the same appears to be the case for home-use models, or at least it was a few years ago. Jasna rightfully demanded ear muffs to be used when the blender operates at a high speed, and I acknowledge she was right. Besides, how cool is it to have kitchen equipment so powerful one must wear ear muffs! If I was Tim the tool man, I sure would have produced a very respectable grunt. I don't believe the urge for ear muffs is unique to VitaMix, any powerful blender will be loud.

I must say that I became a firm believer in using a high-power blender such as VitaMix. The smoothness of the smoothies and creaminess of soups without cream is just unbelievable. The motor appears to be built to last for a long time. Not all is perfect though. We had to purchase a new jar, because the seal on the original jar went, and the blade assembly cost the same as the whole jar. Recently I had to replace the potentiometer that regulates the blending speed. Very easy to do yourself if you are not afraid of a soldering iron. Otherwise, the $10 DYI repair apparently costs $150 if done by the friendly and certainly well qualified VitaMix technicians. Given that my blender is out of warranty, I opted to face the soldering iron. Which I hadn't had a chance to use since we moved from Slovenia. Imagine another grunt by Tim the tool man.

So let us make a smoothie! I categorize the ingredients into three categories, fresh fruit and vegetables, liquid, and add-ons. Proportions and quantities are somewhat arbitrary. The last thing one needs in the morning is to break out a scale and weigh kale by the gram. This is what I used this morning:

Fruits and vegetables: About 1/3 bunch of kale, a handful of fresh pineapple cubes, one small cored apple, one small cored pear, one banana.

Liquids: Orange juice, about one cup, and juice of one lemon.

Add-ons: A couple of tablespoons of almonds, 2 tablespoons of soaked chia seeds, a tablespoon of coconut oil, a good sprinkling of cinnamon, a tablespoon of oat bran.

I start the blender at a slow speed and then increase the speed just enough to incorporate and chop all the ingredients, then I increase the speed gradually, all the way to the turbo mode. I let the blender run at the top speed until I can't see any specks of kale or other ingredients, probably about a minute. The result is a bright green smoothie with a nicely balanced flavor. 

Green goodness

The key is the lemon juice which brightens up the flavor and balances out the somewhat dull taste of raw kale. Note that I added some sweet ingredients, namely the orange juice, the apple, the banana, and also the pineapple. Those, too, round up the flavor rather nicely. One can, of course adjust the ingredients in any arbitrary way and cut down on sugar. For example, water works just fine instead of orange juice. I like a lot the combination of orange juice and pineapple, like in pin colada, that is why I used both. Jasna tells me that she learned from the nutrition class at Stanford that the morning is the time when one needs to get some carbohydrates, so the smoothie serves that function for us.

The yield is more than one can and should drink at breakfast. Jasna and I each drink about a cup each, the rest goes in the fridge and we use it as a very tasty snack. Note that this smoothie is loaded with fiber from kale, almonds, chia, pear, and oat bran, and that it also has a bit of protein, so it is almost a complete meal.

Note: After reading the blog, Jasna corrected me. Half of the calories from the fruit come from fructose, and what the lecture was referring to was glucose. We continue to consume the smoothies.

Note that you can throw your vitamin pills in the blender along with other ingredients. This is a good trick especially if you have a problem swallowing.