11 October 2009
Recipe for Roast Pork With Apple Sauce
It's that harvesting time of the year, with the trees turning a golden brown and the fruit fulsome on the trees. I picked an armful of windfalls from our garden and took them inside to make apple sauce to have a with a delicious joint of pork that we had. The joint was delicious - slow roasted with roast potatoes, home-made apple sauce and carrots with broad beans. This is how I made it.
Ingredients
1.4kg free range pork with thick covering of skin & fat
6 decent sized cooking apples
1tbsp orange juice
3 - 5tbsp Fairtrade caster sugar, to taste
To prepare the pork joint, score through the skin but not all the way through the fat, say about 0.5cm. Then repeat this every 0.5cm across the skin. Next rub 2 teaspoons of sunflower oil over the surface and liberally sprinkling it with sea salt; massage the sea salt into the skin and set aside.
I follow the method that Sophie Grigson used in her fabulous book "Meat" which says that you cook at 180oC for 30 minutes per 500g plus an extra 20-30 minutes at the end for safety. This should cook the joint perfectly and give you a good crunchy crackling; it certainly works for us, but the key is the skin & fat on the outside and how you prepare it.
As for the apple sauce, I peeled, sliced & diced these and bunged all of the ingredients into a heavy pan with a lid on. I cooked this at a low-medium heat for 20 minutes. I took out the cinnamon quills, then pulsed the apples to a fine sauce and served this cold.
I served all of this with roast potatoes and the vegetables.
You should buy the best quality pork you can find, as the classic supermarket meat is tastless and full of water. Free range or rare breed adds a lot of flavour that seems to be missing from the bland kit that the big shops sell. Try your local farm shop or a mini-multiple like Booths.
