We're in Manhattan's East Village.
We're at a restaurant called Tuome,
run by Chef Owner Thomas Chen.
He has made a dish that I think
is the best evocation of Chinese roasted meats.
It's a pork belly that he's made into a kind of terrine,
and then lay it on a supremely crisp pork skin.
It really is one of the great pork dishes in my opinion.
To basically make the perfect pig bite.
Let's go inside and let's see how it comes together,
and more importantly, how it tastes.
(rock music)
It's a three-day process, and we use the bouchon pork.
What I love about this dish is that
it's very, sort of, comforting.
It's pork belly.
It's very, sort of, homey food.
But the technique that you use is really, like,
nobody could have come up with this
that didn't have a really strong culinary background.
We take the belly, dry brine it in salt,
and we rub ginger and garlic into it,
and throughout the cooking process, it moistens the meat.
We pour duck fat over it and that's another layer of flavor.
And then it gets cooked in the oven
at a really low temperature.
So you confit it, basically?
- [Thomas] Yeah, confit, for 15 hours.
Wow, so that really breaks everything down,
and it just becomes, you can pull it apart with your hands.
Yeah. At that point.
At that point, we discard the skin
where the meat lays.
All the gelatin is kind of scraped off.
After it's cooked, you're left with a skin that doesn't
have that chewy feeling that you get from a pork.
- [Nick] Do we pull the meat?
We press it on the skin and then it goes into the walk-in.
Obviously when it cools, the fat congeals, right?
So it'll be solid? Yeah.
Then we cut it into cubes.
Each order gets about ten cubes.
Then we render it down in a pan.
(rock music)
Okay, well, here we go.
This three-day process ends up
with this magnificent feast laid out before us.
I think I should just get right in there
and just try the first piece of pork.
What do you think?
(crunch)
Mmm, you hear that crunch?
So many layers of pork going on in that.
It's not chunks of meat,
but it doesn't completely fall apart like a mousse.
It's got some character to it, it's got some bite,
and what that does is really convey
the different parts of the pig in a really nice way.
You're getting really different flavors.
I keep going back to the skin because,
in a weird kind of way, it's so crisp on the outside,
it's like the skin on Peking duck,
so it is kinda very referential to
a lot of classic Chinatown food.
And with the resulting contrast of that
really supple, tender inner flesh,
except that instead of duck, you get the flavor of pork,
which, in my opinion, is more profound.
But I think that once we add some of these other condiments,
we're gonna kinda change the dynamic of the dish.
Then it becomes a very different experience.
This is a sambal.
Chilies, lime juice, it's spicy.
It's gonna give it a nice kick.
That adds a really nice acidic punch.
There's also a little bit of heat.
It's not overpowering.
It's not even as strong as like,
maybe like a vinegar-based hot sauce might be,
but it does really help to sorta
counterbalance the extreme richness of that.
What I really appreciate about this dish
is the time and care that goes into it.
Three days, it's an arduous process.
Really, it's a lot of work for what is
essentially about ten bites of food at the end of the day.
But, I think what he's done is really
quite unique in my experience.
He's really synthesized the best parts of those dishes.
Whether it's Peking duck, whether it's pork belly,
whether it's spare ribs, and sort of
distilled them into single bites
that are just the perfect bites of pork.
You know, pork belly is implicitly a very rich dish.
And there's so many different things you can do with it.
But what I like about this is that
he's using pork belly to evoke
the rest of the animal, if that makes sense.
This doesn't really taste like bacon.
It doesn't really taste like ribs.
It doesn't really taste like pork chop.
But it kinda tastes like all of them at once,
if that makes sense.
Every bite is like the perfect part of the pig.
You get the crunchiness.
You get the salt.
You get that tender, sweet flesh.
And it really is quite sweet-tasting just on it's own,
because that's the nature of pork flesh.
My recommendation to you is if
you are a lover of pork belly,
get down to Tuome, try the Pigout for Two.
You don't have to share it.
That's just a recommendation on the menu.
Thank you very much for watching.
I'm gonna sit here and finish this off,
and we'll see you on the next episode of The Meat Show.
- [Chef] Put in there, not a huge amount.
Little lemon juice.
Extra virgin olive oil.
I mean, this is basic.