Sweet Onion Pork Belly Kebabs

Recently, I received a grill as a gift of sorts, which means a whole new branch of food (and additional challenges and experiments in preparing it) has opened up to me.  What piques my interests, of course, is that many different cultures and peoples, each with their own style and techniques, have separately developed the art of grilling over several millennia.  Being Chinese and American, it makes the most sense for me to explore these grilling cultures first, and then maybe converge on the old world spanning from Western Asia (or as Americans call it, the Middle East) through the Mediterranean to Europe.  Interspersed in that, I may also try learning how other East, South, and Pacific Asians grill.

First experiment: American Barbecue.  While I was at work on Friday, I got the idea that pork belly would taste amazing on kebabs.  I had no time to pick up the ingredients for dinner Friday night, so I let the idea marinate as I salivated through the night.  Saturday morning, I ran out to grab all the ingredients and began preparing the kebabs.  I bought pork belly that was prepped for Korean barbecue so that the slices were very thin and therefore stackable on a skewer.  I chose this approach rather than large cubes for two reasons:

1. Thinly sliced meat takes much less time to marinate.
2. I thought that thinly sliced meat would cook a little more evenly, rather than having a cube burn on the outside but still be raw on the inside because heat had not yet penetrated.

The marinade was prepared by combining half of an onion minced, minced garlic, minced ginger, laoganma (老干妈) chili peppers, some cayenne pepper powder, mirin syrup, vinegar, and a little soy sauce.  Many of the ingredients were substituted based on what I have at home versus what I envisioned to be a good American Sweet Onion sauce.  Because I usually do not cook Western food, I lacked ingredients like ketchup, apple vinegar, apple juice, and mustard powder.

The kebabs were designed to maximize the juices of the meat and the properties of the vegetables in a way that made sense to me.  Doing some online research, I initially learned that most folks do not stress too much about the design of their kebabs since this is supposed to be one food item that is quick and convenient.  Regardless, I thought I would try implementing what I have learned about ingredients.  The pork belly was always tightly cupped between two concave slices of onion to encourage the enzymes in onion juice to seep into the meat while the meat juices flavored the onion.  Following that, I placed two layers of green and red bell peppers to refresh the palate between bites of rich pork belly.  While grilling, I brushed the leftover marinade onto the kebabs generously on all sides to ensure that the flavor soaked into the kebabs.

The finished result was kind of beautiful and mouth-wateringly delicious, but the credit goes to the meat.  As one website said, making the best kebabs starts with selecting the cut of meat, so I gave myself a good head start by picking pork belly.  Next time, I would spice up the kebab even more as the chili and cayenne was mostly lost in the tangy sweetness of the sauce.