[jyl]

I got curious about how you're supposed to cook pork belly, and looked at some recipes. Most call for baking/roasting the meat. Some Asian ones call for frying it. They are a lot faster and simpler than the half-day process I'm describing, so you might start with one of those recipes instead. Sorry about that.

I do still like my process because you're cooking each part of the meat differently - the meat is slow-braised the whole time, turns all melty, while the skin gets plenty of dry heat, gets nice and crisp, plus you get a sauce out of it.

I also thought of some small points that I do, but forgot about.
- don't score the skin more than necessary. The outer surface of the skin is the crispy stuff. It wants to shrink. If you score too much, the surface available for crisping will shrink to little pips.
- you can skip the scoring altogether, just cut the meat into pieces with the skin-side down. But you'll break the skin if it is really crisp.
- Don't use flour or other thickener for the sauce. Want a strong reduction, not a pasty gravy. You start with plenty of liquid, for this reason.
- I think it might be interesting to try flavoring the meat with different liquids. The liquid used in the second (open cooking) stage doesn't have to be the original cooking liquid. It could be, I dunno, milk, fruit juice, spirits, whatever.