Recipe: Sunday Roast Pork

Lets face it, there is alot of pork eaten in Bavaria, and it is really cheap here. I like a good roast on a sunday, to soak up some of the weekends booze, so why not do a really easy roast pork dish. You do not want to be messing about in the kitchen all day, so this is a really easy way to do a good schweinbraten. I like to do it in a dark wiessbier sauce, because it justs tastes great, but a light weissbier also works.

1 pork roasting joint
1 bottle dark Weissbier (Franziskaner or Paulaner work well)
300ml chicken or veggie stock - use the powdered stuff if you want.
1 carrot
1 onion
2 or 3 cloves garlic
1 stick celery or a chunk of celeriac
Tbsp of salt dissolved in 150ml water
Butter
Fresh Parsley
handful of coarse breadcrumbs - brown, white, doesn't matter. Just chuck stale bread in a blender for a few seconds.

Alot of the time, the butcher will score the pork for you (scoring is cutting that criss cross pattern into the fatside of the joint). If possible, get the pork unscored, it is better to score it later, rather than before cooking as you will see.

Roughly chop the carrot, onion and celery/celeriac. Really, just hack them up, as they will be used only to flavour the sauce, so who cares how they look.
Whack the garlic with the back of a knife, and the papery skin will come away easily.
Chuck the hacked veggies and garlic into a pan with some butter over a medium heat and soften a bit, then put them into a roasting tray, with the pork FAT SIDE DOWN. Pour over the beer, and stock, and scatter the breadcrumbs around the roast. These will actually thicken the sauce as it cooks. Add about a teaspoon of sugar to the sauce, as the beer will give the sauce a bitter edge.
Put the roast in a preheated oven at about 180 or so- if you have a fan oven, tun the fan off - it dries things out IMHO.
The cooking tijme is dependant on the size and cut of meat, but roughly 1hr 15 minutes per kilo should be fine for most cuts.
Half way through cooking, take the pork joint out, and turn it over, so the fat side is now facing upwards. If the meat was not scored, score it now, by just running the tip of a sharp blade into the skin, but not all the way through, and make a criss cross pattern. Brush with the salted water, and pop back in the oven. The salt water will make it go nice and crispy on top, but the meat will still be tender, as you have done more of a braise than a roast. If it was prescored, the liquid will have loosed the fat a little during the first part of cooking, resulting in a less good looking finished dish, but will still taste goooood.

When done, take out the pork, put it onto a plate, squeeze a little lemon juice over, and cover in foil to stand. This is really important. Meat contracts when heated, and if you leave it to stand for a bit, it will relax, and become more tender. This is especially true for steaks - you can cook a steak really rare, but if rested, when you cut into it, it will be pink, but will not ooze blood. Also, when meat is rested, lots of juices come out, which can be poured into the sauce for flavour.
Back to the recipe - the pork is resting, so its time to finish the sauce. Give the roasting pan a good scrape with a wooden spatula to release any bits that have stuck - its all flavour. Pour everything, sauce and veg, into a sieve, and push it down to get all the liquid out you can. Whisk some cold butter (cut into little pieces) into the sauce to thicken a bit more, and add a good shine. Slice the pork really thickly, german style, and pour the sauce over. Top with some chopped parsley, and serve with potato dumplings, or whatever you fancy.

This sounds delicious Don. I'm gonna give it a whirl this Sunday. Will the butcher understand pork roasting joint or is there a special German name for it?

Hoddy, just ask for a piece of pork for schweinsbraten. The supermarkets also always have pieces of pork for roasting. Just get one hunk of pork that has a nice layer of fat on top. I don't really know any german names for stuff, as I try to avoid speaking german, and just grab what I want. Loin (lender?) is a good cut. Supermarkets tend to pre-score the meat, which is not 100% desirable, but makes it easy to see that it is right for roasting! Depending on the size of your roasting tray, keep an eye on the liquid levels. If it starts to look like it is reducing a bit too much add a little extra stock or even water.
Because all the rubbish has to be separated here, we keep all the onion peels, carrot trimmings, mushroom trimmings and the stalky bits from herbs in a pot, then chuck in a few roasted chicken wings(hacked up to release the gelatin from the bones) and make up a good batch of chicken stock every now and again, and freeze it in little pots or even ice cube trays. Chicken wings cost nothing, so it is worth doing, though a bit time consuming. Once you get used to having real stocks as the basis for sauces and stuff, it is hard to go back to powdered bouillon. Specially with beef stock, but that is a REALLY time consuming thing to make. Takes about 8 hours to make a good beef stock, and another couple fo hours to reduce that down into a 'demi-glace', the dark magic that many french recipes for sauces are based on.
Have fun with the pork! If you are going to make dumplings, and cannot be bothered with making them from scratch, get some potato dumpling mix from the fresh section of the supermarket - that dry mix stuff is awful I think. And ALWAYS put some croutons fried in butter in the middle of the dumpling!!! I hate it when I cut into a dumpling in a restaurant, and there is no little crouton in the middle!!!

Thanks Don. On the subject of stock...I see in the stores these little "sachets", if you will, of veggies that I assume are to be used as a basis for stock. If I throw one of those in a pot with some mashed up chicken wings and cover it with water how long should I cook it and should I add any herbs to the mix? I suppose I could find this information out on the internet but you have a certain style with dispensing cooking tips that I like!

I think those little sachets are called 'suppengemüse'. FOrget them. In the fresh veg section you always get fresh packs of suppengemuse, a little bag with a carrot, a lump of celeriac, an onion or two and a sprig of parsley. If you do not eat enough veg to warrant buying packs of carrots, onions and stuff, then these little stock packs are useful enough. Just chop up the veg, throw in a pot with a bay leaf or two, perhpas a clove or two, and the chicken wings. Obviously you could have a roast chicken one night, and use the carcass instead of the wings.
You can either roast the chicken wings, which will give a stock of good colour, suitable for sauces, or throw them in raw - this will give you a lighter coloured stock, better for white sauces, or soups. Cover all the veg and bones with water, and bring to the boil. Skim all the froth and scum from the surface, and let it simmer, not boil, for about 2 hours, skimming periodically. Drain the stock, let it cool, then refridgerate. Becaseu of the gelatine in the bones, you should end up with a nice loose jelly.
The chinese tend to cook whole chickens in water, and then slice it up, dress with soy sauce and sesame iol, and eat it with rice, lettuce, cucumber, and a bowl of the cooking broth on the side. It is a dish imaginatively named "Chicken Rice" from the Hokkien part of China. Surprisingly good though!
You can add herbs if you want. Thyme would be a good choice, maybe a leaf or two of sage. I tend not to put too many herbs into a stock, because I prefer to keep a 'clean' stock flavour, and not taint it too much with herbs. Basically makes the stock more 'all-purpose'. You can always add herbs to the dish you are making with the stock after all, so its not worth putting them into the stock itself. If you just fancy the lovely smell of a herbal broth in the house, then throw in some standard dried herbes de provence, or italian herb mix.

Great advice Don. One last question...do you cover the meat while cooking? I was just informed by Mother From Hell that I cannot use the oven unless I cover the meat because it "sparkles too much"!!!!!

Nope, I do not cover the meat - if you do, then you actually protect the meat from the heat of the oven, and consequently, it will not crisp up the fat enough. However, you could cover it for the first half of the cooking. It should not 'sparkle' too much though, because (a) there is liquid in the roasting tray, which will prevent any fat in the tray from spitting, and ( because the first part of the cooking is done fat side down, most of the actual fat renders out from the meat into the sauce, and leaves minimal fat, and just the skin, whcih is why is crisps up so well.

Anyway, ovens are meant to get dirty - or they would not have invented oven cleaner!! :wink:

Do you not need to sear the meat first, before putting in the oven? Also, will it work just as well with beef?

Now I've gone and done it! Doh. I mistakenly poured the salt water in the mix! Only about 1/2 of it actually made it into the pan before I realized what I had done but I'm afraid I'm in for a salty pork roast. :shock:

Turned out pretty good. +1 refused to try the "gravy" at first because of the beer but relented and ended up scarfing it down. Served it with garlic mashed potatoes and a tossed salad along with a cheap bottle of red wine. Great Sunday dinner. Thanks Don and keep those recipes coming.

Glad you enjoyed hoddy. Granny, you could sear the meat first - some schools of thought believe that meat should always be seared to 'seal in the flavour'. I don't think that this is wonderfully scientific really - how can you 'seal' flavour in just by cooking the outside a bit? Searing meat adds flavour to the sauce, thats for sure, as all the caramelised bits are where the flavour is at, and of course searing meat will add a deeper colour to the sauce. This recipe doe snot actually benefit much from any searing, as the sauce colour is good enough anyway, and the pork fat produces a good crisp finish anyway. If you try it with beef though, then I would probably sear it then. What you could do with beef is use guiness. Well nice. Then serve it with some onions (halved) slow roasted to bring out the sweetness. Don't even peel them, just half, rub the cut side with a little brown sugar, and roast in a very slow oven for a couple of hours.

Thanks Don, I've created a simmilar dish using beef cut into chunks and guiness/sweet stout, the taste is amazing. Sadly, guiness doesn't travel well therefore, I don't know if the flavour would be affected in my dish?
Can we leave the pork for the Germans and move onto something else??

You can get cans of Guinness with the little widget in it from a fair few places in Mu, and that works OK. We can indeed leave the pork to the Germans - I prefer beef to almost any other meat anyway!

I always liked roast lamb the best. Unfortunately one day my mother had a dream in which she was standing in a field surrounded by little three-legged lambs - they'd each had a leg removed for roast dinners. After that, she refused to cook roast lamb any more. I was seriously unimpressed.

I'd try to cook it myself, but anything more complicated than bread and cheese invariable causes a disaster. I had bread and cheese on both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, in fact, so I suppose I better eat out tonight.

Where can you get the Guinness from - I have never seen it?

Hey Don,
what's your line of business? Are you a pro?

I used to get Guiness from the little Newspaper shop inside of the Drugstore Cafe in Schwabing. Dunno if it is still there actually, but I am sure Karstadt has it.
No Ruggedy, I am not a pro. No money in cooking, so I do stuff with computery things for money.
I always worked in kitchens when I was a student, as the hours suited me. Started washing dishes at 14, and learnt more about the cooking bit to get promoted up from washing stuff! Carried on working in different pubs and restaurants, but never took any formal exams or anything. All self-learnt.
Got more and more interested as I saw more foreign countries, and their food, and information justs seems to stick in my head. I read alot of books about food, and over the years, have built up a wealth of crappy knowledge about food. Mostly useless info, but I do well in "Food & Drink" categories on quiz machines at least!

I wouldn't say that there is no money in cooking, just that it is elusive. But I agree the amount of work required to earn a decent wage in cooking is too high. Better to get a real job to feed your addiction. :-) Have you read Anthony Bourdain's books?

I haven't read his stuff atall. I understand his books are quite funny though - more of a general rant about the restaurant world than cookbooks. Bit like Nico Ladenis' first book. I think the Lenny Henry 'Chef' character was based on Nico. I might well buy one of Bourdains books though if they're good. I have been consuming info about asian food since living out there, and am now thoroughly bored of it, so I could do with a book based more around 'classical' cooking. Got given a load of german cookbooks at the weekend, and some of them are well old. Interesting, but nothing spectacular.
You are right - money can be made in food though - look at that mockney Jamie Oliver bloke. Very average cooking talent, but calls his nan tiger, throws a few blokey phrases about, drives a crap moped, and makes a mint from selling books to housewives that have got fed up with Delia. What a life. I was watching Keith Floyd recently on TV - now there is a bloke who has ABSOLUTELY no idea how to cook. What a prat. I have never seen him actually produce a decent dish, he just makes fundamental mistakes, and drinks loads of booze. Pretty sure anybody could do his job. Mind you, he has no money, he lost it all trying (and failing miserably) to run a decent restaurant.

:shock: Man you put some strange things in your recipes, don!

His books are only OK, but should be of special interest to anyone who has an interest in the food business. I got the 2 of them tied together in a cheapo bookshop in Ireland. 'A cooks tour' is the better one of the two. I give them to you if they weren't in bloody boxes in a warehouse somewhere in suburban Ireland.

On a side note have you ever been in the Kafir Feinkost shop on Prizregentstr.? I pass it on the bus every day. Looks interesting. Ring the bank for a mortgage first though! Or has anyone eaten in Kafir in Hofgarten?