Easy 7-ingredient slow cooker pork belly with soy sauce

A handful of ingredients and a slow cooker turns simple pork belly into a meltingly flavourful dish. An added bonus is having a versatile sauce you can save and use in future dishes.

Serves 4, 15 minutes prep time and 6 hours cook time.

Pork belly is a marvel of a cut:  layers of fat are interspersed with mild, sweet meat that cooks into a fine texture.  As the pork braises in the slow cooker, the fat melts around the meat and what you have left is substantial, rich and incredible.  Most markets will sell raw skin-on pork belly in long strips or slabs.  Either is fine here.  Just sharpen your knife and cut into serving-sized chunks, knowing that each piece will shrink at least 30% as it cooks.  Like bacon, a little goes a long way:  I generally expect 1-2 pieces per person.

This recipe incredibly easy:  mix everything together, put it in the slower cooker, flip the pork belly halfway through and blamo.  Done. It can be made a day ahead:  the added bonus is that you can store the cooked pork, sauce and all in the fridge and skim off the fat the next day (more like chip off/peel of, as there’s so much of it).  It’s a weirdly satisfying task.

Can I double this recipe?

This recipe was made in a 5 quart slow cooker.  *You can only increase the recipe up to as much pork belly as you can fit in one layer along the bottom of your slow cooker*.  The single-layer is critical for the proper colouring and flavouring of the meat.  So if your slow cooker can fit twice the amount of pork, then you can safely double the recipe.

Do we really need so much green onions?

You will be taking the green onion stalks and creating a “nest” in the slow cooker, which will protect the meat from direct contact to the pot, preventing the meat from sticking to the surfaces and drying out.

Can I use something other than brown sugar?

Sure thing, the sweetness is meant to balance out the cooking wine and the soy sauce; so yellow rock sugar, Muscovado sugar, white granular sugar will enhance the sauce differently.

What’s a substitute for Salted Shaoxing Rice Wine?

Internet says dry sherry.  I suggest dry vermouth.  For a non-alcoholic substitute use low-sodium chicken broth and a stem of thyme.

Save the leftover sauce!

This sauce is truly a gift from the gods.  It can be strained and saved in the fridge, skimmed to remove the fat, and used many ways:  to fortify your favourite stir fry recipes; marinate beef short ribs before frying; poured over rice or ramen; act as a base for soy sauce eggs or soy sauce chicken wings.   The collagen in the pork belly would have cooked into the sauce, so it does solidify into a jelly when refrigerated.  But it will melt back into a liquid at room temperature.  Enjoy.