Chicharrón

Name: Chicharrón
Total time: 8 h 15 min
Cuisine: Colombia, the Andean Interior
Ingredients: 1kg pork belly, skin on; 2 tbsp salt; a pinch, optional bicarbonate of soda (optional, to help dry the skin); 1 cup frying fat

Antioquia, Colombia

Chicharrón, deep fried pork belly with blistered crackling: a rough pile of golden brown pork belly pieces, the skin side deeply blistered and puffed into crisp crackling, a faint sheen of rendered fat on the dark wooden board beneath.

Illustration

Time: Hands on 15 minutes · Waiting 8 hours

Researched: Researched from 130 sources in the brief

by Antioquia, Colombia

Antioquia's history in layers runs on a different fuel entirely, and its best-known dish carries a myth worth dismantling. Bandeja paisa is widely said to descend from arriero trail food, a composed plate a muleteer could load with enough calories to survive days on the road. Colombian food writers reject this outright: the Antioqueño arriero was poor, and poverty does not build a plate carrying beans, rice, ground meat, chicharrón, a fried egg, arepa, plantain, chorizo, morcilla and avocado all at once. What the documentation actually supports is a disputed, mid-twentieth-century restaurant and tourism-marketing invention, with at least three competing accounts and no consensus among them. One, from the anthropologist and cook Clara Grisales, places its construction with Cotelco, Colombia's national hotel association, meeting in Bogotá in the 1950s specifically to invent a dish that could represent Antioqueño cuisine to visitors, and Grisales herself is sceptical of the result, saying that calling it representative sits far from what paisas actually ate and eat at home. A second account credits the Bogotá restaurateur Hernando Giraldo, at his restaurant El Zaguán de las Aguas in the 1960s, with piling several dishes onto one plate for a commissioned event and, taken with the effect, keeping it on his menu under the name bandeja for the serving tray itself. A third names an even earlier appearance, in the 1940s, at a different Bogotá restaurant, under the name Plato Marinillo. What every account agrees on, whichever is closest to true, is that the dish was a restaurant and hotel buffet invention from the start, not a home dish scaled up: as one Antioqueño columnist puts it, few paisa households actually cook every component of a bandeja paisa on one night, because it was never built to be cooked that way.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Chicharrón

Overnight drying, then about 10 to 15 minutes' frying.

Ingredients

1kg pork belly, skin on
2 tbsp salt
a pinch, optional bicarbonate of soda (optional, to help dry the skin)
1 cup frying fat

Method

Salt the pork belly, sometimes rubbed with a little bicarbonate of soda to help dry the skin further.
Leave uncovered in the fridge overnight so surface moisture can evaporate.
Fry or roast in fat hot enough, at least 190°C, that the remaining moisture in the skin flashes to steam almost instantly, blistering it into crackling while the fat beneath renders through.
Change the oil once or twice through a long frying session to keep the fat clean and the result crisp rather than greasy.

What a modern chef changes

Two-Stage Crackling

Rung 04

Method

Extend the traditional drying step with a dehydrator rather than an open fridge shelf, pulling meaningfully more surface moisture out overnight than passive air-drying achieves.
Render the belly sous vide first, low and slow, to cook the meat through evenly without any risk of it drying out.
Finish only the skin side under the Big Green Egg's direct, fierce heat for the final, genuine crackling.
Grind toasted panela and salt together in the spice grinder to a fine dust, finished over the hot chicharrón the moment it is cut.

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