I bought a slab of pork belly the other day at the local chinese supermarket. I've done pork belly before in bacon form - I wanted to try it in a more chinese preparation - roast with crackling skin. It looks easy enough, so I gave it a shot. I prepped the pork belly with a semi-wet rub and scoring of the skin, and went to start the oven only to have it refuse to light - so I gave up and tried the electric roaster, since I didn't feel like putting this off until I could get the oven to work. The roaster works for turkey, so it will work with pork belly, right?
Wrong. The skin just got gelatinous. The meat cooked well, but the fat just turned to glue. I tried to crisp the skin by frying it in a cast iron pan and weighing it down - this worked, but only the top layer of skin. The bottom layer was still gelatinous and it did nothing to de-glue the fat.
The tastes are all right, but the texture is all wrong. I ate a few pieces and so did everyone else in the house, but the consensus is that this is really, really bad. I'm going to have to pitch the whole kilo of meat, which is... unfortunate. All in all, this was a tremendous Food Failure.
This has the potential to be awesome, but moral of the story - electric roasters aren't good for anything but fucking poultry.