Peppery Roast Pork Belly With Garlic-Vinegar Sauce

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