Pork belly with spicy sauce 茹で豚のピリ辛ソース

We were served this dish at our friend's home while we were in Japan. It is a pork belly dish but quite different from my usual "Kakuni" 角煮. The hostess graciously shared the recipe with me and I made this dish.  The key is the spicy sauce. Without it, the pork is rather bland.

Compared to Kakuni, not much fat gets rendered out. The piquant sauce (mine turned out much spicer than we had in Japan) really makes the dish.

This is much simpler and easier to make compared to Kakuni. I made some changes to the original recipe for the sauce.

Ingredients:
About 1lb pork belly.
Several slices of ginger
Several stalks of scallion
Sake 1tbs

For sauce
4tbs of roasted sesame oil
4tbs soy sauce
2 dried Japanese hot peppers, seed removed and chopped
1/2 tsp finely chopped garlic
1/2 tsp finely chopped ginger
1 stalks of scallion finely chopped

Directions:
1. In a large pan, boil water and dunk the block of pork belly for 30 seconds, pull it out and wash it in cold running water.
2. Replace the water in the pan with fresh water and add the slices of ginger, the scallion, and the sake. Submerge the pork belly in the water and let it come to a boil and then turned down the heat to simmer (see below).
3. Remove the scum that will form on the surface of the water as it simmers and cook it for one hour.
4. Let it cool down in the cooking liquid to room temperature.

For the sauce:
In a small sauce pan, heat the sesame oil and add the red pepper, scallion, ginger and garlic. When fragrant, add soy sauce. When it comes to boil, cut the flame and let it cool to room temperature.

To serve, slice the pork belly and add the sauce.

This is a good pork belly dish. The red meat portion gets a bit dry but overall, it is nice and unctuous. Eating the meat alone, it is rather bland but the sauce really makes it. My sauce was much more spicy than the one we had in Japan. My wife usually does not like overly spicy sauce/food but she liked the sauce. It is sort of a variation of "Ra-yu" ラー油. We kept the meat in the cooking liquid in the refrigerator. After, slicing, I briefly micro waved it (20 seconds) to take off the chill. It was as good reheated as when just cooked. The sauce can be stored in a sealed container in the refrigerator.