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pork belly

pork belly

6 3.4
A fatty cut of pork from the pig's belly that people cook, for example to make bacon
  • noun
  • /pɔrk ˈbɛli/
translation icon : panceta
  • For dinner, I prepared pork belly that was perfectly cooked and tender.
  • crispy pork belly
  • braised pork belly
  • glazed pork belly

I am making a chili pork belly which sounds so good.

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Examples

  • Add the pork belly pieces in a single layer.

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  • First, I used it to slow cook some pork belly in the crock pot.

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  • "Alright, two orders of the pork belly BBQ then."

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  • Our best batches are all heavy on the pork belly and cayenne.

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  • Fresh, spicy, with smoky pork belly...

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  • I also loved fatty meat since I'm Chinese, and pork belly is actually a delicacy when cooked right.

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  • Do glazed pork belly and do bok choy.

  • The smoked pork shoulder was delicious, as were the grits, gravy, and pork belly.

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  • And thus, we set our sights on Hahm Ji Bach in Murray Hill in search of pork belly BBQ.

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  • It's like thinly sliced pork belly all shoved on the skewer with green onions in between and some delicious looking sauce.

Synonyms

sowbelly
vspork belly
  • Archaic
1 9.8

Salt pork cut from a pig's belly and used for cooking

is the fresh underside cut used for cooking or for making bacon

How Fatty

fatback
  • US
4 8.9
pork belly
6 3.4
shoulder
44 5.3
pork loin
7 2.5

Surface Forms

pork belly singular
pork bellies plural

Morphology

pork + belly

The compound refers literally to the belly portion of a pig used as meat, so its meaning is directly compositional from 'pork' (pig meat) + 'belly' (abdomen/underside). This part-of-animal naming pattern is common in many languages and culinary contexts, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents would readily understand the MWE.

Etymology

Pork belly comes from the simple picture of a pig's lower side: pork means pig meat and belly means the animal's underside. So, because this fatty side was used for bacon and slow cooking, the name became the usual word for that exact cut in cooking.