Sunday, January 31, 2010

I slow roasted this bad boy for 3 hours, the crackling came up amazingly. One of the greatest things about this pork is also sometimes it's worst, it's high fat content. I'm a great believer that while the huge amount of fat between the skin and meat is delicious, it really needs some attention. Eating a peice of fat almost as thick as the meat can put some off. So I decided to remove the sheet of crackling and to place the pork fat side down in a frying pan. this rendered out a large amount of unneccesary fat and ultimatley create a second layer of cracking from the caramelised fat! this also freed up the crisp skin to be part of it's salad.
Once my pork was well rested, it was time for it to join it's friendly 'salad' friends on the plate.

this was comprised of carrots that had essentially been pickled in a vegetable stock brine with alot of salt, peppercorns and star anise. Batons of green apple that had been compressed with vitamin C powder and citric acid to creat translucent, crunchy sour apples. mustard fruits and fennel tops added their respective savoury sweetnesses, colour and dimension of flavour. the crackling being as fun to eat as ever. In hindsite I might have done a very light sauce with it, but I enjoyed the fact that the pork was juicy enough on it's own.





































Bangalow Pork - Sunday Lunch

This is the lovely Banglalow Pork loin I got a short while ago for a sunday lunch. The idea for this dish was some very simply roasted pork with some fresh textural garnishes taking place of a 'salad'. so the most obvious starting point for creating this dish was to find a piece of meat good enough to be essentially a dish on it's own. Having just recently been living in Byron Bay quite close to the famous pork reigon of Bangalow, I promptly got my hands on a beautiful piece of loin with the rack on. and off we go!