Cooking What is Available

Costco pork belly at $3.79/lb.

Meat shortages are increasing as factories have closed due to the coronavirus: [bold added]

America’s farms are still packed with animals raised for meat production. The problem is that the virus has made it increasingly hard to turn those animals into store-ready packs of pork chops or ground beef.

That’s because Tyson and many other meat processing companies across the country have paused operations at a number of plants where workers have tested positive for COVID-19. According to the USDA’s weekly report from April 27, beef production was down nearly 25% year-over-year, while and pork production was down 15%.

After the rubdown.

Vegans, nutritionists, and environmentalists may applaud the decline in production for different reasons, but carnivores like me should also look at this as an opportunity to expand their recipe repertoire.

Cheaper cuts of beef, pork, and lamb are still plentiful, and next to spices the other ingredient one needs is time--time to marinade and slow-cook--and time is what I've got plenty of these days.

The belly had shrunk by a third

Last week Costco was selling pork belly strips for $3.79 per pound, about half the price of chuck roast. A few months ago I had tried to slow-roast pork belly at 200°F. After four hours in the air fryer the product was rubbery and greatly disappointing. It was time to complete the experiment.

I rubbed the strips with prepackaged char siu (Chinese red pork) seasoning and left them overnight in the refrigerator. The next day I tried various combinations of temperature and roasting duration, one strip at a time.

The best result for this air fryer turned out to be 90 minutes at 275°F. The pork strips were fork tender, with a slight crisping around the edges. A great deal of fat had been rendered; the cooked belly had shrunk by a third. I put the fat in the fridge to solidify for later disposal in the compost bin.

Pork will go onto the shopping list. The coronavirus has brought us closer to our grandparents' life by forcing us to fix things ourselves, rediscover the joy of driving, and learning to cook what is available, not what we want.