BBQ Pork Belly

I have recently been reading several articles that spout the virtues of BBQ'd pork belly so I decided to give it a try but trying to find a pork belly is not the easiest thing to find in stock at your local grocery store. I checked a source two on the Internet and the prices ranged from 15-50 dollars per pound. For me these costs were outrageously outrageous. Seriously folks, how many of us can afford $50.00 per pound for fatty pork.

I made some inquires with grocery stores near my home (a few miles from New Orleans) when amazingly I found a Winn Dixie store who had one. The meat market manager told me that he had received an order from someone who wanted three belly's but since there were four to a case he had the remaining one in the freezer.

It was a tad bit more than 14 Lbs and much more than I had planned on buying and obviously that's a bunch of belly and I was worried about the cost. I had hoped that the per pound cost would be somewhere in the $5-$6 bracket I was shocked when he charged me $2.08 per pound.

Enough about that; so what exactly is a pork belly? Well its exactly that, the belly of a pig that is most often used to create one of the tastiness pieces of meat known as... Bacon.

To make bacon, the pork belly is cured and cold smoked, but for BBQ it is not cured or brined but smoked for hours until the fat had rendered and the meat is as tender as a fine steak. Just think of BBQed pork belly as high-end pulled pork from a pork butt.

I trimmed the belly into several manageable pieces leaving one large piece to cook but since this was the only piece of meat that I was cooking I used my Weber Performer Deluxe instead of my Weber 22 inch WSM.

I set up the Performer fueled with Kingston charcoal and hickory chunks and hoped to smoke the belly at 225-250 degrees but that was not working. Suffice it to say, 300 degrees worked without a hiccup.

After about three hours in the Performer the belly had a significant amount of smoke but was still tough, so I double wrapped it in foil and put it in the oven set at 225 degrees.

After about an hour I was enjoying the wonderful smell of BBQ pork in my kitchen so I pulled it from the oven. It was oh so tender so I stripped it of its foil and placed to on a cooling rack to set.

With fat rendered, the succulent and juicy belly meat was indeed a culinary experience.