Adventures with twice-cooked pork

In some Chinese cooking recipes for pork, you're to cook it twice. Once boiled (or some other slow-cooking method) and once grilled. I am not sure about the science behind this, but the taste is really good.

I tried this with pig ears in June, and I'd tried it with some fatback in my wok. This summer, I had access to a barbecue, and so I decided to give it a go with some spare ribs. My butcher likes to cut his spare ribs thick as a brick, including a few healthy layers of meat and fat on top.

To make this, I decided to boil the meat with some random herbs (random because you could use any herbs, really): thyme, laurel, and rosemary, together with some pepper and coriander. Once the meat had been in boiling broth for about 1.5 hours, I took it out, let it cool for a few hours - because I had a few hours, but cool is cool enough - and broiled it on the grill.

While broiling, I covered it with some thyme syrup that I'd made by making thyme tea and adding lots of brown sugar over heat.

I served with home-made chips and grilled eggplant. It was as good as it looks.