Last week,  15 year old Connor, who is a HUGE fan of Gordon Ramsay, found this recipe and requested that we cook it up ASAP. I sent him off to the meat freezer to find the perfect piece of pork belly for this adventure. Yesterday afternoon, we enjoyed this scrumptious dish, made even more perfect accompanied by summer squash and bread left over from last Saturday’s market.

Yes, we DO have pork belly available for purchase!

Our fennel is on the way out, so we did our best to get some of that flavor in with a small bulb and some stems. And we didn’t have cardamom, so we substituted with some black peppercorns and clove buds instead. Overall the recipe turned out wonderfully… but our skin on top was a bit too hard to chew in places, so next time we’ll play around with the cooking times and temps.

In the video Gordon mentions 180 degrees. Is this celsius or fahrenheit? I don’t know. We set our oven to bake at 356 degrees and baked our smaller piece of pork belly for 90 minutes instead of the 2.5 hours he suggests. Next time we will try 180 F, instead.

Scored, seared and ready to go into the oven, resting in a pool of our farm chicken stock and a melange of spices.

All done!