Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

Burnt ends—super barky pieces of barbecue brisket carved off the point—are amazing, but they have one problem: There’s never enough of them. You only get a few precious morsels off a <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/ultimate-smoked-bbq-brisket">whole smoked brisket</a>.There are a couple solutions to this problem: You can just be satisfied with this rare cook’s snack, like eating asparagus only in spring or tomatoes only in the summer. Or you can transform an entire brisket—or some other pricey cut of beef—into “burnt ends,” cutting it up and smoking the heck out of those pieces.But there’s a better way: Just use pork belly.Ingenious Kansas City pitmasters came up with this porky iteration as a way of satisfying the demand for burnt ends without breaking the bank (or messing with beautiful briskets). And it’s every bit as delicious as the beefy version, because pork belly seems designed by a deity for the task: rich with fat, robust enough to withstand a long spell in the smoker, and easy to portion into perfect cubes with tons of surface area for the smoke to stick.

Barbecue Pork Belly Burnt Ends