Cut your pork belly down to about 5 pound chunks. Rub the maple syrup all over the belly. Add chunky real salt or chunky Celtic salt to the entire piece of meat. Place in a Ziploc bag and place in your refrigerator for 5 days. You may want to put this in a pan in case it leaks. Make sure to flip this bag and rub it all over each day. After 5 days, remove the belly and rinse it off, then smoke it. We have done the smoking in a number of ways. We have cooked it in a smoker for several hours, and we have cold smoked it over our fire pit. In the fire pit we placed the fire on the opposite side of the belly, and in a way that the wind would blow the smoke on the belly. We found that 2 1/2 hours of smoking was plenty, but more might be better. Then we let it rest in the refrigerator covered for a day and the next day placed it in the freezer for 1 1/2 hours which made it really easy to slice. We cooked some up right away and the rest went into the freezer in Ziploc bags. We have plans to get a better set up, but we used what we had, and it all worked great. Some people skip the smoking and enjoy it that way too.
