Butcher Counter Classic · Crackling Roast Pork

Siu Yuk (Roast Pork)

Photo: Francesc Fort / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

The skin is pricked all over and rubbed with salt, then blasted with high heat at the end — that's what makes it puff into crackling.

Pork belly is rubbed with salt and five-spice, then roasted until the skin puffs and shatters into crackling, before being chopped into pieces and sold by weight over rice or noodles at Tiong Bahru Market's cooked-food stalls.

Why it's made this way: Roast pork is part of the Cantonese roast-meat tradition perfected in southern China and carried into Singapore by early Chinese settlers, and it became one of the everyday plates sold at Tiong Bahru Market's stalls alongside chwee kueh and lor mee.