Re: Pork Belly

PA Mom-mom · ‎05-27-2015

@Mom2Dogs I think smoked pork belly sounds delish! I only buy pork belly when we make our own bacon. It's very time consuming. You have to salt and season it (and use just a tiny bit of saltpeter), wrap in plastic and let it sit in the refrigerator for about 7 days, flipping it over several times. Then you smoke it and slice it into bacon strips. There are other techniques out there, but that's what we do. A whole pork belly is so big you need to cut it in half to make it easier to brine. You can get smaller pork belly cuts in the grocery store or from the butcher.

rms1954 · ‎06-06-2019

Oh no never.

RedTop · ‎09-01-2010

@Mom2Dogs
Yes, being raised on a farm where we raised and butchered our own pork, I have cooked, and eaten many pounds of this meat in my lifetime.

To us, pork belly was referred to as slab bacon, fat back, or streak-ed meat. It was sliced, peppered and fried in a cast iron skillet on the wood stove, and is the meat that provided the most fat drippings for seasoning other foods, and was used in the making of a pan of lye soap.

We ate this fried meat on homemade biscuits for any meal of the day, and never tired of it. Eggs were fried in the fat, and the flour for milk gravy was browned in this fat. This is the perfect cut of pork to make homemade pork rinds, and I was eating them long before I ever heard the name or saw a bag of pork rinds in a store. I was more familiar with seeing slices of this meat on a platter, or chunks of this meat in the middle of the bowl of beans, the fried cabbage or bowl of greens on the supper table.

In recent years I have seen TV chefs fawn over this tender meat, season it on both sides, and bake it, and serve in slices with fancy trimmings on the plate. To me, that meat just needs to be slapped into a hot skillet, fried and served on a biscuit!