if you've got a little bit of time on your hands and you want to make something special for your family this is this is the best recipe for poretta what we've got here is belly pork what we've done with this is we've brined it this is a 10% brine with a few arom mats a little bit of garlic a little bit of thyme and we brined it for 24 hours the more connective tissue and fat the higher the Brine and the higher the length of brine cuz it can withstand it and and take it so
in the brine we just put a few aromates we put some garlic few herbs and then just basically just heated it up and then let it cool and then put the meat inside so to start off I'm just going to open it up like a book so you just go all the way through the meat so what you want is you want these multiple layers all the way through your poretta sort of basically cutting it in half but width ways all the way along when you get to the end just be really careful that you
don't go all the way through and there you've got a really nice flat layer so if you imagine what we're going to do now is you're basically going to roll this and the reason we do so many layers is because then I can get loads of flavor packed inside and then to make our flavor rub traditionally in Porto it's really important that you've got fennel seeds so we've got ground fennel seeds here they've just been toasted in Blitz this is a little bit of ground oregano lots of black pepper mix of herbs I've just got
thyme basil sage and some garlic and then to help it Blitz just a little bit of oil as well to be honest you can just use some black pepper corns and some fennel seeds will be delicious we blitzed it really really really roughly it's going to cook for a long time so you really don't need to worry about getting it too blitzed up cuz all of those garlic clothes will soften nicely inside take a spoon and don't do a really thick layer just keep it nice and thin thin and even and consistent all the way
through I did a St at CLA Smith's and the head development Chef made one thing they they they did really well was all their staff food and ton was a development chef at the time cooked it for us and it was just probably the best thing I've ever tasted so this method we wanted to put Porter on the menu but we wanted to do it in a way that was nice and consistent and Easy in the restaurant and so this is the method that we've sort of decided on so I've rolled that up I'm keeping
it nice and tight and there's a tiny little gap of an overlap here between the skin and that's okay and then you you want to try and press the meat in as much as you can and then to tie it this is just a simple basic tie I don't know if it's particularly right or not but this is what I've just uh I got taught how to do when I was a little bit younger so you start right at the top and you just do a simple straightforward sort of knot and then this just secures
it for the rest of the process so release a little bit more of the string and just tie it twice around Loop it under and then just pull and then you can just pull belly is quite easy cuz it's uh super robust so you can just tighten that up accordingly and then you just go on the next one I you can prop a nerd out here and do do like lots and lots of them but you know Sunday I'm going to be drinking a nice bottle of red and watching the uh TV so just do
a few nice loose tires that keep it all in place well what do I watch doing the baby reindeer reminds me a lot about you know my my life June the other day the first time it's really good you can let me know in the comments if this isn't the right way to do it but I'm pretty confident it's you know I think with all these things it you know there's there's I'm sure there's a classical French book that tells you exactly how to do it but most of it the time I'm just trying to
work it out on my own so there you go and this works that te technique works for pretty much anything and then to finish what I do is I just release a bit more of that not too much and then Flip Flip The Joint over and this is our presentation side and then I just Loop it under so just do if you just do this it just it just binds the whole thing together um other things you can do with poretta you definitely can score the fat so you can um you can put this cross-hatch
um slices all the way through and then rub salt in and leave it for a day or two that'll like secure it and hard Harden it up a little bit but in the restaurant we found that this method that we do it it doesn't actually add that much and it just takes a little bit longer so and then you just tie another little simple knot there and that keeps everything in place and then this is going to go into an oven with a COR Buon so I'm using water here I'm only using that just to
show you I've got a little bit of stock that I used last time I made my poretta and basically you start with water the first time and then save this stock in the freezer but that's just from the last time I made my poretta instead of using that if you don't have it add some chicken cubes in there do it your first time and then you know you've got it for the future cuz you're going to want to make this every godamn Sunday shots go in garlic goes in and then something that we don't use
that much of in the UK I think just a bulb of fenel so this will give it a really nice sort of an aedd kick to it we actually cook this super low and we're going to flip it halfway through okay the the way you get crispy skin is by rendering it out if you render it in water what happens is little basically little water particles get trapped in the cells of the skin and then when it's set and then dried basically exposed to really intense heat then that's how you get crackling or crackly crispy
skin so you can do 10 hours at about 5° in she goes see you later this is my finished cooked belly and it's basically just been chilled down for a little bit in the liquid passed the liquid off whacked in the freezer and now this is ready to cook I put it onto a rack whack in the oven 200° 20 to 25 minutes okay so 20 minutes 200° that looks super crispy nice nice nice so take that out and importantly just let it rest for a minute what you all want it here so almost like
glass-like crispiness it's more of like almost like a Le Leon so like Filipino kind of style uh crisp to it sweet so to portion just go down those handy little uh tracks that you've already made and the big reveal oh my God look at that look at that so so glistening so so crispy perfectly crispy perfectly cooked it's absolute Delight
