Name: Coffee, star anise & liquorice-braised pork belly & quince with mushrooms
Yield: For 6-8
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 2 quince; 6 star anise; 6 cloves; 250 g mushrooms (I used shiitake and porcini, cut into large chunks); 8 cloves garlic, peeled and halved; 80 ml soy sauce; 1 onion, peeled and thickly sliced; a few quills of cassia (or 2 cinnamon sticks); 2 spring onions, sliced, to garnish; 60 g white sugar; 24 roasted coffee beans, roughly crushed; 2 thumbs of ginger, peeled and sliced; 15 ml (1 Tbsp) toasted sesame oil; 80 ml black vinegar (or 100 ml Shaoxing wine or dry sherry); 1.5 kg pork belly, ask your butcher to remove the rib bones in one piece but keep them; 15 g dried liquorice root (or 2 pieces unflavoured liquorice)

Preparation info

For
6-8

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Fusion

By Peter Gordon

Published 2010

About

The first time I’d ever heard of cooking pork with coffee was when speaking to an Indian chef who was cooking in a hotel in Guangdong province in China. We were talking about Fusion as a culinary concept and he said that in a country like China, which has such a history to its food, it was often hard for people to adapt to change. But this had all begun to change in recent years as foreign ingredients were arriving in China and young chefs were keen to experiment with them in dishes which h