Belly Up

 

 

BY JAN GREENBERG

Think you've menued every part of the hog but the squeal? A growing number of chefs are discovering the high-profit, high-menu-interest power of the fresh belly.

When 19 winners of regional pork cook-offs gathered in April in Orlando, Fla., for the National Pork Board's annual Taste of Elegance chef's competition, the judges went hog-wild over Glenn Soulia's ancho-chile-braised belly of pork with fresh ham sausage, stuffed squash blossom and vegetable/apricot chow-chow.

Soulia, banquet chef at The Inn at Perry Cabin in St. Michaels, Md., says a coworker who was scheduled to participate in the competition had to drop out, and suggested Soulia take his place. "'Well,' I said, 'why not?' And I ended up with the winning plate."

While pork belly in the form of bacon, which is cured and then smoked, and its Italian cousin, pancetta, which is simply cured, have been restaurant and consumer staples for centuries, it is the uncured belly that is making its debut on restaurant plates.

"The belly used to be called 'side meat,' and no one really used it for anything but bacon or salt pork," says Larry Cizek, director of culinary and niche-market development for the Des Moines, Iowa-based National Pork Board. "But about six or seven years ago, I began to notice that while we would be doing some demonstration or event in front, all the chefs in the back room were munching on the belly. Pretty soon after that I started seeing it on menus."

"Pork belly is one of the five primal cuts of the pig, although it is only fairly recently that it hasn't been considered a secondary cut," says Bryan Severns, who teaches meat fabrication at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vt. "American culinary tastes and cooking techniques have matured past the 'just grill me a steak' stage, and we also have a growing group of chefs who are saying, 'I want to show you how I can take this lesser-quality cut and make you want to eat it.'"

Severns says not only is pork belly economical-a restaurant can purchase it for less than a dollar a pound, and then get upward of $20 for an 8-ounce serving-but its popularity is driven by the boutique-farm industry. More and more chefs are purchasing whole pigs from local farms, and when they do, they must find ways to use the whole animal.

Entering prime time
For some chefs, the belly lends itself to unexpectedly elegant presentations, such as the braised pork belly and stuffed pig trotters that Daniel Boulud serves with lentils and root vegetables in a black-truffle jus at Daniel in New York, and Thomas Keller's whimsical "pork and beans," braised belly with a cassoulet of early summer pole beans at The French Laundry in Yountville, Calif. Other chefs feature dishes more befitting a trencherman, such as Tom Douglas' Big Breakfast featuring red-wine-braised Pacific octopus with pork belly and a fried egg at Lola in Seattle. The bottom line, though, is that pork belly has gained a stature few would have imagined less than a decade ago.

One of the last places one might expect to see such a rich and high-calorie item is on the menu of a restaurant that adjoins a sports club. But at Pulse at The Sports Club/LA, a luxe fitness center overlooking New York's Rockefeller Center, pork belly has a fan in Chef Jake Klein. Klein grew up in Miami, where his grandmother was a local restaurant reviewer who frequently took the young Klein to some of the area's most noteworthy establishments. "I grew up eating Norman van Aiken's and Douglas Rodriguez' food," he says.

Klein, who has traveled extensively throughout the Far East, refers to Pulse's Asian-inspired menu as "an album of my travels." He often features pork belly as a special, smoking it so that the skin gets crisp but the meat is meltingly tender. He then uses the meat for flavoring, and sometimes even brushes the fat on toast. But for specials, such as crispy garlic-braised pork belly with white beans and dark miso, or grilled shiso and smoked black-pepper cured, pork-belly-wrapped scallops with citrus/green chile, Klein slow-braises in an Alto-Shaam. His all-electric kitchen is located in one of the Rockefeller Center's historic buildings, which forbids the venting necessary for gas.

At Jack Falstaff, the newest addition to the San Francisco-based restaurant group, PlumpJack, Chef James Ormsby features pork belly on the menu all year round. Garnishes change according to season, with persimmon or quince in the fall and a late-summer fig/mint relish. At the height of last summer's peach season, pork belly was featured as 48-hour Duroc pork belly with Brentwood creamed white corn, peach caviar and natural pork jus. "It's one of our mainstay dishes," says Ormsby. "Obviously, it doesn't sell like something like crab or steak, but it is a fairly good seller."

Ormsby, who was named "Best Chef in San Francisco" by San Francisco Magazine in 1999, likes to sous vide the pork bellies he buys from ethnic grocers in the Bay area or gets from fatty farm-raised Durocs when they are available. From the centuries-old practice of enclosing food in a pig's bladder and then heating it in water, today's sous vide technique was developed in France in the early 1970s as a way of minimizing the shrinkage of foie gras during cooking. "It's the only way you can manage such a long cooking time in a controlled environment," says Ormsby. "You can control the waste, and it keeps the fat from melting all away."

Buying Pork Belly

Pork belly can be purchased with its skin and bone, or skinless and boneless. According to Molly Stevens, author of All About Braising (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), which won awards from the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals last year, whole pork belly with the skin and bone is the first choice, although it is difficult to find. More easily available is pork belly with the skin but no bones, and some chefs prefer just the belly itself, which looks like raw bacon.

In the revised edition of her classic, The Cooking of Southwest France (Wiley, 2005), available this month, Paula Wolfert includes recipes calling for ingredients unavailable even to chefs at the time of the original book's 1983 publication. Pork belly is among them. "The availability of so many products and ingredients today has made it possible to prepare recipes in this country that you just couldn't do 20 years ago," Wolfert says.

Among Wolfert's favorites is a recipe given to her by Jean-Pierre Moullé, chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., for a classic petit sale, a salt-cured pork belly that she serves with a fresh fava-bean ragout, but which works well with lentils or cabbage. "I try to get the belly with the skin," she says. "I remove the skin, and use it to make a confit of pork rinds. It's the secret to a great cassoulet, and I can add it to all sorts of lentil and bean dishes and even salads with a strong vinegar dressing."

Local ethnic butchers usually carry pork belly, and there are an increasing number of small farms that pasture raised hogs direct to restaurants. Mail-order sources include D'Artagnan, www.dartagnan.com, and Niman Ranch, www.nimanranch.com.

It's all in the name
At Cypress Low Country Grille in Charleston, S.C., Chef Craig Diehl is reintroducing the area's indigenous low-country Gullah fare using pork belly as one of his mainstays. Born in the small central-Pennsylvania town of Danville, Diehl attended Johnson & Wales University in Charleston, and never left. In addition to his own version of Pork 'n Beans, a slow-braised pork belly, seared diver scallop with baby butter beans and smoked-pork reduction, he uses the rest of the belly in a variety of ways. Some of the fat he grinds with ground beef to make "the most unbelievable meatloaf" or extra-juicy hamburgers. He takes the scraps and preserves them in salt for a traditional salt pork, which he adds to collards.

"Although this is a fairly sophisticated area, and bacon and salt pork are mainstays of Southern cuisine, pork belly on the menu is a rather new feature, and we tend to use it as a special," says Diehl. "I call it 'belly' on the menu, but when the staff goes tableside, I have them describe it as 'braised fresh bacon,' which enlightens most people."

Indeed, selling pork belly to a novice customer can be a challenge. When Chris Prosperi, chef/owner of Metro Bis in the Hartford, Conn., suburb of Simsbury, put pork belly on the menu, he didn't think it would be such a difficult sell. "Chefs ordered it when they came in, as did the occasional customer who really knew food," he says. "But we had to take the word 'belly' off, and began to call it 'slow-roasted pork.' As soon as we did that, people started ordering, and when they tasted it, they loved it. They'd say, 'Oh my God, this is the best-tasting pork I've ever had.'"

In the rolling hill country of Texas between Austin and San Antonio, the town of Fredericksburg is increasingly a food and wine destination. Just a few miles out of town, at Rose Hill Manor, Chef Ned Elliott holds forth in the kitchen of the inn's restaurant, Austin's. Elliott, who attended The Culinary Institute of America and worked in New York restaurants that included Tabla, Ducasse, Picholine and Per Se, moved to Texas with his San Antonio-born wife, Jodi, who is the restaurant's pastry chef. In Texas, Elliott is serving a different clientele than in New York. "In New York, people were interested in having the chef guide them through the meal," he says. "Here, people are less adventurous, and about half just want to come in and eat a good filet mignon. But we keep discovering that people have a growing interest in trying something different."

Elliott likes to get his belly with the skin, so he can quickly put the finished belly under the salamander for a crisp-skin finish. "We basically marinate it for a few days with some rice-wine vinegar, white wine, brown sugar and a little balsamic and soy, and then braise it very slowly for a few hours until it is fork tender. Often we serve it with oysters, clams or scallops. The combination of salt and sweet is a nice pairing to seafood."

Award-winning chef/writer Marlena Spieler, who writes a weekly food column for the San Francisco Chronicle, says the belly is among the most versatile of cuts. She slices it crosswise, slathers it with marinade, and grills it. There are pork-belly roasts, chunks that she uses to make carnitas, and the skin for cracklings. "I love pork belly," she says "It is the most beautiful and delicious cut of a pig."

Jan Greenberg is based in Rhinebeck, N.Y.