Salt & Pepper Pork Bites

This is inspired by the famous Taiwanese Salt & Pepper Chicken. I saw salt and pepper chicken recipe being featured in Rasa Malaysia some time back (here) and was thinking of making something similar with pork belly. This is quite an easy dish, which can be taken as snack or appetizer.

As we do not take any fats, I discarded the thick layer of skin and fats on top of a strip of pork belly. I then cubed it. Instead of pork belly, tenderloin can also be used. After cutting it into bite-sized pieces, the next step would be to tenderise the meat. I mixed some soda bicarbonate into the cut pork belly and left it aside for roughly 1/2 hour before washing it off. After this pre-treatment, you will feel that the texture of the meat is very soft and slippery. The soda bicarbonate need to be washed away as it leaves a slight bitter after-taste on the food. 

After this pre-treatment, I marinated the pork belly cubes with ginger and garlic that I pounded earlier, salt, 5-spice powder, sesame oil, Chinese rice wine, pepper and some fried chicken powder. For the cubes to be crispier after frying, I coated them with a layer of corn flour. I accidentally discover this technique of using dried/cooked corn flour few years back. One of the ingredients required in the preparation of snowskin mooncake is cooked corn flour. It can be made by dry-frying the corn flour in a wok or using an oven. I prefer to use the oven as it is would not cause as much dust and mess as using a wok. Few years back, when making the snowskin mooncake, I made some extra cooked corn flour. So I just stored the extras in an airtight container in the fridge. When I was making my homemade seafood tofu, I used it to coat the tofu before frying. The result? The seafood tofu were extremely crispy. Since then, I have started to coat any food that need to be fried with cooked corn flour before frying. I guessed during toasting in the oven, the remaining water content in the flour has been taken out and therefore producing crispier fried food when coated with the cooked corn flour.

I coated each piece of pork belly cubes with cooked corn flour before frying them in batches. Once all have been fried, I discarded all the oil from the wok except for 1/2 tbsp which I used to stir-fry 2 sprigs of curry leaves till fragrant. Then I turned off the flame and added the pork cubes back into the wok. I stirred them for few seconds before adding in sparingly some fine salt, pepper and icing sugar. I tossed them to ensure that all the pork cubes were coated with the salt, pepper and sugar. You have to adjust the ratio of salt, pepper and sugar to your liking, bearing in mind that salt have been added to the marinates earlier.