{"id":868,"date":"2011-02-08T08:31:16","date_gmt":"2011-02-08T15:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/?p=868"},"modified":"2016-06-27T11:07:20","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T18:07:20","slug":"pork-belly-pickled-vegetables-bbq-sugar-polenta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/2011\/02\/pork-belly-pickled-vegetables-bbq-sugar-polenta\/","title":{"rendered":"Pork Belly, Pickled Vegetables, BBQ Sugar, Polenta"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This dish represents a pretty great amalgamation of Things I Love: modernist cooking and pork bbq.<\/p>\n

The obligatory explanation: Pork belly, cured for 2 days in a salt\/chipotle cure, is cooked sous vide and seared. It’s topped first with spheres of pickled carrots, cucumber and red capsicum, then is encased in a brittle, thin, “bbq candy” shell. It’s served atop a bed of mascarpone cheese polenta, and garnished with fresh marjoram. The pork belly is fall-apart tender, which you discover after cracking through the exterior BBQ; it’s like eating a giant, warmed BBQ M+M or something. It’s a little bit amazing.<\/p>\n

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Finding pork belly isn’t as trivial as rolling into Safeway and snagging some off the shelf. My beloved Berkeley Bowl didn’t carry it, nor did Whole Foods. After a bit of calling around, I found it at a butcher up on College Ave called Ver Brugge, as well as at the Market Hall butchery. I only needed a small bit of it. When I went to Ver Brugge, they told me their bellies were frozen. It was cheaper, but I didn’t know if the freezing bit suggested that it wasn’t all-the-way fresh, or if that even mattered. So I bought a bit, then went down to Market Hall and bought another bit there, which was fresh from the day before. It cost nearly twice as much, but I wanted to see if the pre-freezing meant a flavor\/texture difference.<\/p>\n

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Normally I’d go into the usual detail here about how the experience of making this was. This time, though, Sarah and I prepared something a little different. Sarah’s been on a jag for months to shoot a video, so I borrowed a small Canon T2i from a friend at work that’s capable of shooting HD video. For a weekend, I cooked and Sarah filmed, neither of us knowing much of what we were doing. She’s done all the editing and grading. Here’s how it turned out:<\/p>\n