Name: Peppery Roast Pork Belly With Garlic-Vinegar Sauce
Yield: Makes 3 to 4 servings as a main dish or 6 to 8 servings as part of a multicourse meal
Cuisine: Hakka
Ingredients: 4 green onions, including green tops; ½ cup water; 2 tablespoons minced garlic; ¼ cup rice vinegar; ½ teaspoon five-spice powder; ¼ teaspoon ground white pepper; 1 pound boneless pork belly with skin, in a single piece (see note); 1½ tablespoons kosher salt; 2 teaspoons black peppercorns

Preparation info

Makes
3 to 4
servings as a main dish

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

The Hakka Cookbook

By Linda Anusasananan

Published 2012

About

At Taiwan’s Hungry Ghost Festival, a celebration to honor ancestors, it is said that ghosts travel back to earth to visit the living and eat their food offerings. The Hakka offer a pig—not any pig, but the fattest specimen available. Families compete to raise the “divine pig.” One year the winning swine weighed in at fifteen hundred pounds.

One winner created this recipe to preserve the prized pork belly. He coated strips of pork belly with salt and aromatic spices, then stashed som