Spiced Pork Belly with Pear Salad & Apple Sauce

This recipe is from the Masterchef magazine, Issue 4. The recipe is actually designed to be served as an entree and includes pan fried scallops but I wanted to modify it to serve as an amuse-bouche. To prepare the pork you marinate a boned piece of pork belly in a spice mix of ground star anise, black peppercorns, coriander seeds, cinnamon, thyme leaves and a bay leaf. This spice mix is combined with crushed garlic and sea salt and rubbed over the pork belly. After 30 minutes you remove any excess salt and sit the pork into a casserole dish covered with vegetable oil or duck fat. The pork is covered with a cartouche or piece of paper sitting on the surface to stop evaporation and slow cooked in the oven for 3 hours. The pork is then removed from the oil and refrigerated until cool between two oven trays weighed down with weights (or canned food) to form a nice flat even shape. Before serving the pork is cut into thick strips and pan fried until golden brown and crisp. To serve you cut the pork into bite sized squares. My pork belly skin had been scored which made it a bit hard to cut into neat squares so next time I would cook it unscored.
The pear salad is simply finely cut pear and watercress sprigs dressed with lemon juice, dijon mustard and olive oil. The apple sauce is made by reducing apple cider, apple juice and a scraped vanilla bean and seeds over a low heat until syrupy (about 10 minutes). My children had drunk all my apple juice so I just added a little more apple cider! My sauce didn't seem to thicken as it should have but still had a nice flavour.
I served the squares of pork belly in chinese spoons on a bed of salad drizzled with a little apple sauce.
The pork was delicious, tender flavoursome meat and crisp skin, that worked really well with the salad and sauce. Pork belly is very rich due to the high fat content so this is not something you could eat a lot of, making it perfect for an amuse-bouche.
Rating 8-9 out of 10.