Sarah's parents were in town for her father's birthday, figured I'd make a couple his favorites - beef tenderloin and pork belly. The beef was pretty standard, just a couple cuts in a bag with some garlic and a few herbs, cooked to a higher temp than I would have preferred but had to please the crowd, and didn't want to deal with cooking to different temps. The pork belly is where I got a little more creative.
To start I picked up a nice 2.5 lb belly from the butcher and gave it good rubbin. The rub consisted of smoked salt, a dash of curing salt, pepper and brown sugar. After that I put some cheese cloth on the fat/skin side and layered on sliced roasted garlic followed by smoked onions. The purpose of the cheesecloth was two fold - make it easier to remove the garlic and onions when it's done cooking, and prevent those from making indentations from the final product, all while still imparting the flavor.
I put all that in the bag and sealed, cooked at 154* for 24 hours earlier in the week, then straight into the fridge. Two days later I was making the rest of the meal for dinner including the steaks in the SV at a lower temp so I took the pork out and threw it in the bath for about 20 minutes to get the juices flowing, then emptied the bag through a strainer, reserving the liquids. Cut the belly in half length-wise then one of those halves into 5x squares while reducing the juices down to a syrup. The next part I forgot to take a picture of, but I covered each of those squares (fat side) with a light layer of brown sugar and hit it with a torch to make a crispy shell on top brulee style. Once the juice was reduced to a thick syrup I covered the belly with the syrup and served.
This turned out perfect in every way but one, I wish I had done something to keep the belly up to temp after coming out of the reheat bath. I covered with foil after cutting it up but I should have worked out another solution (low temp oven would be the easiest, but I had an oven full of sides already going), the final product was closer to room temp than hot. Other than that I would definitely make it the exact same way again. With the half of the belly we didn't eat I chopped it up (last picture below) and split it into two 9oz packages for the freezer, these will mixed with some hash browns and covered with runny eggs sometime in the future
