Dhruv Baker's roast pork recipe - Waitrose

http://bit.ly/r4vlMT - If you're thinking about cooking a roast, pork is a brilliant option, it's delicious, it's versatile and above all it's affordable and great value.

Three different cuts from the essential Waitrose range, shoulder, belly and leg -- all of them are great but today we're going to cook leg. The reason being that you've got that great ratio between the fat and the meat and you've also got a great amount of crackling.

So put that into a roasting tray, get rid of these two. Now you'll see that the skin has already been scored which is essential to get the crackling right. And it's been taken out of the packaging and patted dry with a paper towel -- that's to get all the moisture out to make sure that does crisp up and give you that delicious crackling.

The next stage is to rub a little bit of this rock salt, just rub that into the skin and you want to massage it into those lines, but don't put too much because you will end up over-seasoning the pork.

Now the next bit is the cooking -- there's sort of two stages to the roasting process, so the first one is it goes into the oven at quite a high temperature, between 210 and 220 degrees and then after about 15 minutes you drop the temperature down to 180 degrees. Cooking time will depend on the weight so the average rule of thumb is about 20 minutes for every 500g and then 20 minutes over. So take this over to the oven and get that cooking.

Now that joint has had about an hour and a half in the oven. You can feel that it's got that wonderful crunch throughout. Now don't worry if you haven't got that crispy finish, what you can actually do at this point is cut the strings then cut the crackling which will come off in one piece from that joint and pop that back into the oven -- but don't be tempted to cover it because what will happen you'll get steam under that and you'll stop it from getting crunchy.

Cut the strings and peel them off so you can get that crackling off in one piece. Now you can tell you've got a really good quality piece of meat when you've got such a fantastic finish to the crackling. All of the Waitrose pork is British, it's outdoor-bred and it's raised to the highest standards of animal welfare. Now take this lovely bit of crackling off in one piece and set that aside to stay warm and as is essential when cooking any piece of meat, especially with roasts, is to set that bit of pork aside to rest for about 10 minutes to let those natural juices flow back into the joint.

Now break up the crackling and you'll find actually the lines where the pork's been scored the crackling breaks perfectly along those lines. That's crackling done, all that's left to do is carve the pork and serve this wonderful roast.

For more recipes from Dhruv Baker visit the Waitrose website at http://www.waitrose.com/.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Waitrose
• waitrose.com
• recipe
• ingredients
• food
• cooking
• ideas
• delivery
• how to cook
• tips
• guide
• instructions
• baking
• dinner
• supper
• lunch
• organic
• flavour
• taste

[FabricLive39]

'I'm going to take this crackling off in one piece.' erm...lol.