40 Hour Pork Belly Confit Two Ways With Glazed Carrots

So I like to cook. I like kitchen gadgets. I love shit like this. And I really love pork belly. So after a rather fantastic meal at Second Bar + Kitchen here in Austin, where I indulged in a dish that included amazing pork belly and sous vide eggs, I thought it time to nail down a great pork belly recipe here at home.

Got myself just over a pound of pork belly at Whole Paycheck and proceeded to come up with a cure similar to the recipe here.

It went into the refrigerator looking pretty much like this (even though this is after the next steps):

After 12 hours overnight, I pulled the pork out, rinsed off the salt, sealed it in a bag, and sous vided (its a verb now, damnit) the thing at 144*F for 40 hours. After the 40 hour mark I cooled it between weighted cookie sheets because you don’t want it to curl. When I removed it from the fridge, it looked near as makes no difference to what you see above.

After cooling, I had to scrape off the tasty tasty fat, so the dull knife edge and some scraping left my dogs very happy and a pork belly looking pretty limp:

So the belly when back in a bag into a 140*F bath to warm up. All the while I had carrots in the sous vide at 183*F with butter oil and 21 calories of DEADLY WHITE SUGAR! THROW ME OFF PALEO ISLAND! Also I made a gastrique with a tasty little ingredient:

Likely not good enough for Richard

After the carrots were done, the belly went into a pan with high oleic sunflower oil, was browned on all sides, and plated. Thus we ended up with this:

So what I did for the blob of pork was cut a chunk of the pork belly off, fork shredded it, and whipped it. Could have used a bit more shredding and cooling. but it’s called a rillette.

Anyway Sarah couldn’t tell me enough times how much she loved it; I thought it came out pretty good, certainly up to par with the pork belly I had earlier in the week…perhaps better. The carrots came out really nice as well; the butter oil worked really well and didn’t cause Sarah any problems (she has a dairy allergy).

It seems like a hell of a lot of work but I really only “cooked” for about an hour. It was pretty f’n rico, if I do say so myself.