For The Crispiest Pork Belly, Break Out The Air Fryer

Mention the term pork belly and mouths instantly start to water. Make that pork belly nice and crispy and your friends will literally be fighting for a seat at your table. When pork belly is cooked well, the result is a succulent and juicy interior paired with a crispy and delicious exterior. While there are many components that make for a crispy pork belly, an air fryer just might be the key to getting that epic crunch that meat lovers crave from a perfectly cooked piece of pork.

There are plenty of handy tricks to making great meals using an air fryer, but when it comes to making pork belly crispy, it might help to understand the fundamentals of how an air fryer does its job. You can achieve a crispy pork belly by a variety of techniques, including a low and slow cook followed by a quick broil. An air fryer, which works more like a convection oven than an actual fryer, helps achieve a great cook on pork belly by circulating hot air all the way around the meat, thus cooking it thoroughly in a shorter amount of time. By adding in a few more key components that help keep the inside of the meat succulent and juicy while the skin crisps to perfection, you'll be putting in routine orders for pork belly at the butcher so you can recreate this fabulous dish on the regular.

As pork belly needs an extended cook time to achieve an ideal texture, that also raises the risk of drying out the meat. While using an air fryer will help give you a crispy skin in a shorter time, you have to put some effort into retaining the meat's moisture so you get the crunchy exterior and tender interior you're going for.

You'll want to begin with basting the skin with a vinegar brine to help prepare the meat for the cooking process. This step is an important part of ensuring a perfectly crisped skin that gives just the right amount of crackle without drying it out to the point that it's too hard to eat. A salt brine works similar, juicy wonders on pork chops. The vinegar aids this by helping to dry out the skin as it heats in the air fryer, allowing the skin to get crispy instead of soggy.

The next step — scoring the skin – is key to creating more surface area for the air to get in and cook the meat properly. You don't want to cut too deep, just far enough to open up the skin and give it more space for the air fryer to work its magic. Once that's done, you'll want to season the meat to build your flavor profile, with salt taking a particularly important role. Salt doesn't just add flavor, it actually serves a key purpose in the crisping process. A crucial component that many chefs seem to agree on, salting the skin will finish the job of pulling moisture out of the skin and leaving you with the perfect crunchy exterior that makes a legendary pork belly.