Red cooked pork belly buns

Browsing at the Asian grocery store, I found some thick pieces of "bacon" and they immediately called to mind the wonderful pork belly dishes I've eaten in restaurants. So I decided to try making my own! First, I realized that pork belly dishes in restaurants can be kind of a racket given what they tend to charge (not counting cheap Chinese restaurants). A pound of pork belly was surprisingly cheap at the Asian store! Or maybe it's just me having become accustomed to more Whole Foods type meat prices. More power to the restaurants for bringing the idea of pork belly to the masses, though. So pork belly is pretty much what it sounds like. And what I suspected but hadn't confirmed turned out to be true, what we think of as pork belly is simply a bigger slab of what we usually think of as bacon, just unsliced and uncured. And it can be quite delicious and tender.

I used a recipe for red-cooked pork belly and decided to serve it on buns with some greens. The pork belly simmered long and slow in rice wine, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, a star anise, and sugar, until it was so very tender, then the cooking liquid was reduced to more of a sauce. I simply wilted the spinach, poured some of the sauce over that and the pork, and made sandwiches out of it with the buns. So easy, so delicious, so porky... This particular recipe may actually go better with rice--upon eating the leftovers I realized just the sauce itself is extremely delicious on rice in a way the buns can't touch--but there's something about little sandwiches that is just so appealing.