Pork Belly Pizza

Like a lot of towns and villages Bethesda’s Stryd Fawr (High Street) is dead. Not sure if it’s anyone’s fault – no point in going on about it – it’s the way it is. Maybe even worse is the state of the City of Bangor where stretches of the High Street (the longest in Wales) are virually derelict. A village can draw in on itself, absorb the empty shops into housing whereas town streets just sit empty, unpopulated and decaying.

After lock-down and illness and a disastrous holiday we’re trying to motivate ourselves to DO THINGS. We still have comparatively good (if sometimes erratic) transport links except the best places are still reserved for car drivers. So, unless you commit to travelling to Chester or Liverpool, the number of accessible restaurants is pretty limited.

So, last Friday, the choice was get a bus up to Bangor and another to the Erskine Arms in Conwy for lunch, or to forage in Bangor for something worth cooking. The Erskine Arms is OK, sort of cross between pub-grub and brasserie, but hardly exciting. The foraging option has recently been greatly diminished. Marks and Sparks and Aldi were close together opposite the bus stops in Bangor which meant you had the supposedly posh and cheap options to mix and match from. Aldi has just moved out of town leaving us with a supermarket-sized, 24 hour gym. Not a lot of use to me.

So we looked at the Friday market – absolutely, total crap, virtually trotted back down the hill to Marks, where – it’s the little things in life that make the difference – they had packs of belly pork! Talk about seasonal shopping. All through the summer they stock what they see as being bbq gear. But obviously winter is back and so is the belly pork.

Half an hour after arriving in Bangor we are on our way home, where the pork goes straight in the oven for two-and-a-half hours which gives you plenty of time to have a little drinkie, knock up a barbeque sauce and oven fry some spuds. The problem, if it can be called a problem, is it’s probably better scoff than the local restaurants can produce.

But today, with the remains of the pork and the barbeque sauce, I knocked up a pizza the like of which you won’t find anywhere outside of Ffrydlas Road Bethesda.

I knocked up some of the 80% hydration pizza dough yesterday. Haven’t done a deep-pan pizza for some time so 340g of dough in an 8 inch ring on a pizza tin. Layer of small cubes of cheddar, proved for about three hours. Studded the dough with cubes of pork, layer of barbeque sauce, layer of sliced tomatoes, layer of cheddar.

Preheated the Pico to 300C top and bottom. Baked for 16 minutes.

Looks messy but it was the food stylist’s day off + I only had my phone camera + the day was beyond murky.

Probably the most delicious pizza ever, crust crisp on the outside, soft but well baked on the inside.

The barbecue sauce comes from James Martin. Really nice and apple-y – perfect with pork.