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Pot Roast Pork Loin with Cider
Posted By Kerri
Stephen was given Mark Hix’s book British Regional Food for Christmas last year and while we’ve both enjoyed reading it, we’ve never cooked anything from it. So today, when we decided to roast something for lunch we thought we’d make this dish which hails from the South West.
We bought a piece of pork loin from our butcher yesterday and left it uncovered in the fridge, one of his tips for good crackling, we’ve done this before and it works well.
This dish required the rind to be be removed so we did that this morning, poured a kettle of boiling water on it, dried it thoroughly and then sprinkled it with salt. We cooked that separately to make (brilliant and very crunchy!) crackling.
The rest of the pork was roasted in the oven for half an hour on it’s highest setting before the vegetables (onion, carrot and celery) were added with some thyme and some cider. The heat was reduced to 160 and the meat continued to cook for a further hour and fifteen minutes during which time we basted the pork every fifteen minutes with the cider.
We rested the pork for 15 minutes or so while Stephen made gravy. The pork was served with some mashed potatoes, the crackling and some January King cabbage.
It was very good, the meat was cooked perfectly and was moist and tender with a subtle, background flavour of cider. The cider also made a really tasty gravy and the mashed potatoes (baked in their skins in the oven) were fluffy.
Jan 13th, 2008
There was a lot more crackling than in the picture to start with, but we crunched on half of it before it got to the table!
It’s good to be cooking out of the British Regional Food book; there are a lot of interesting recipes to be discovered in it.
Your pork looks astonishingly good! Two questions: did you rub the meat with any herbs, spices, etc., before roasting; and, 2) how did you make the gravy?
Thanks Bruce! We just rubbed salt and pepper into the meat from what I remember.
For the gravy, we made it in the roasting dish with the vegetables and meat juices that were left in it. I can’t remember exactly, but it probably went something like this: Put the roasting dish on the hob on medium heat, then deglaze with white wine (or probably cider since we’d been basting the pork with cider while it cooked), scrape all the stuck bits off the bottom of the roasting dish with a wooden spoon and stir. Then add some chicken stock, stir and left it simmer for a few minutes before checking seasoning and then thickening with a mixture of cornflour and water. I often add a tiny splash of vinegar to gravy as I find it gives it a lift, but if this one had lots of wine or cider in it then I probably wouldn’t have needed it this time.