Category: roast

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Roast Pork Belly with Roasted Vegetables

Crispy crackling, tender pork and tasty roasted veg; yes it was a great lunch and delicious.

Crackling

The pork was slow roasted in the oven, this I have found is always the best way to cook pork belly, it also renders out a lot of the fat, so ensuring that the final outcome is tender pork with minimal extra fat. The flavour is intense and compared to something like pork fillet, which can be cooked quickly, it does not compare to the flavour of roasted pork belly.

About 30-40 minutes before the end of cooking time, I added some onions, carrots and parsnips to the roasting tray. Twenty minutes later I added apple and mushrooms. These cook wonderfully with the pork and have a really intense flavour.

Roasted Veg

I served the pork alongside the roasted veg, roasted King Edward potatoes (they worked well) and some carrots and steamed broccoli.

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Roast Beef Dinner

Last week I was down at the Oake Manor Golf Club. Now I hasten to add this wasn’t for a game of golf, but for an event about social media in education. Though it does make you wonder, all those people playing golf, where on earth do they find the time?

Anyhow, at the event, lunch was provided and it wasn’t a cold buffet, nope there was a carvery, and it was a proper carvery, freshly sliced beef or pork and lots of choices of vegetables. The beef had lots of flavour and the veg was really nice too. Certainly one of the better roast beef dinners I have had.

Lunch

One of the worse was at the National Trust Heelis Café in Swindon.

I went for a traditional roast beef dinner. At £7.50 I expected to get an excellent home cooked roast beef dinner… well I didn’t.

Yes the potatoes were home roasted, and were roasted and not deep-fried as is often the case in some restaurants, pubs and cafes. The carrots were fine, but the brocolli was limp, having spent too much time under a heat lamp. The beef was a real disappointment, wafer thin slices of cooked beef that had been re-heated in gravy. This is something that cheap catering does, and not something I expected from the  Heelis Cafe. The Yorkshire Pudding looked and tasted like it was heated up in the microwave and to be honest I did wonder if the meal was from the day before (as we did order early at midday) and had just been microwaved. I was expecting a proper carvery and proper slices of roast beef, not the equivalent of a £3.99 meal from a supermarket cafe.

Yes that was a real disappointment.

One carvery I remember was at the St Ermin’s Hotel in London.

It was December 2006 and I was at a meeting there, and we had lunch and it was an excellent lunch, nice selection of starters followed by a delicious carvery. Now I have no idea if that is still the case, but I hope it is.

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Roast Pork

Though relatively cheap, a joint of pork loin still makes for a nice Sunday roast.

Cooking lunch

I did manage to get very crispy crackling and a tender moist joint.

One thing I do about 30 minutes before the pork has finished cooking is to add some sliced apple to the roasting dish. I also add other stuff like onions, mushrooms, courgette and bread, however the apple is there as a kind of apple sauce. I do though have been known to cook the apples separately but sometimes for speed and to save on washing up I will roast the apple with the pork.

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Crispy Crackling

So how do I ensure that my pork crackling is crispy?

The key for me is two factors, dryness and hotness.

The pork skin needs to be really really dry. I use kitchen towel to ensure that the pork is as dry as possible. I know some people will rub salt in, but that is basically the same thing, the salt will asorb any moisture on the skin. Personally I find that just using kitchen towel is just as effective.

The next stage is place the pork into a really really hot oven. I have my oven on full and when it has pre-heated, I place the pork in the middle and cook for 15 minutes before turing down the heat to 160℃ or 180℃ depending on the cut of the pork.

As a result, nearly everytime I get a wonderfully crispy crackling.

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Roast Leg of Lamb

Sometimes you don’t want a whole leg of lamb otherwise you will be eating lamb for the whole week…

Many supermarkets are now offering a partly boned leg of lamb, sometimes called a carvery leg of lamb. It is often cheaper and smaller than a traditional leg.

It takes less time to cook than a whole leg (obviously) and when I have cooked them found most to be tender and delicious and certainly better than a boned shoulder of lamb.

What I do find though is that as it is partly boned, though a little easier to carve, the meat does shrink a lot more whilst cooking and some of the meat can be a little tougher as a result.

I usually use rosemary and garlic, classic flavours, to enhance the roast. In the photograph you can see I roasted the joint on a bed of carrots and rosemary. The carrots raise the meat from the bed of the roasting pan and work like a rack. The carrots then make a great base for gravy.

I am interested in using other herbs and spices for the future. Morrocan spices are an obvious choice, but wonder if anyone out there has some winning and tasty ideas.

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Roasting Quail

If you are looking for a huge roast dinner then forget about quail. These are very small and certainly won’t fill you up.

I have had grilled quail in a Vietnamese restaurant as a starter so that’s certainly an option.

I cooked these quail very simply and quite quickly.

I covered them with some pancetta bacon before roasting them in a hot oven for about 15-20 minutes.

After resting for about 5 minutes I cut the breasts off and served. You can fiddle with the legs, but there isn’t much meat on them and it is fiddly…

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Roast Pork

I cooked a very nice loin of pork at the weekend.

Like most times I roast a joint, for the final hour I added chopped vegetable, though this time I also added apple, well it was pork.

Those may look sausages under the joint, but they are in fact carrots. By placing carrots under the pork, it adds flavour and stops the joint “steaming” in its juices and roast more evenly. Just in case you were wondering you can eat the carrots, but I add them to the gravy.

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Roasting Lamb

Lamb neck fillet can be tricky to cook, the last time I pan fried it, it was slightly underdone and slightly tough. Most of the time I prefer to roast it. I do add vegetables to the roasting tray to add flavour and keep the lamb moist.

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Roast Chicken Crown with Chorizo

This was a dish I made last week.

I took a crown of free range chicken. This was actually cheaper than buying two chicken breasts and of course cooking it on the bone means it won’t dry out as much as cooking chicken breasts on their own.

Before cooking I covered the chicken in pancetta, this was partly to protect the chicken, add flavour and also add some much needed fat to the pan for the vegetables roasting their.

The chicken was roasted in the oven on a bed of squash, carrots and onions. After cooking for 30 minutes more pieces were added to the pan, this included chorizo cooking sausage, slice of courgette, mushrooms, pepper and cubes of bread. This was then cooked for a further 20-30 minutes until everything was cooked.

The pancetta was crispy, the chicken moist and delicious. The roasted vegetables were full of flavour and perfectly cooked. The bread was flavoursome and crunchy.

Delicious.

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Roasting Vegetables

One of the things I like to have with a roast are roasted vegetables. I also add cubes of bread towards the end of cooking, these go all tasty and crunchy.

There are different vegetables you can use, this time I was using squash, pepper, mushrooms and onions.