Crusty Pork Roast

Except for bacon, ham or salami, I'm not the biggest pork eater. I find pork is often gets too dry and yes, it has this particular pork-flavor that, depending on its preparation tends to give me a hard time. 

We most of the time go for beef. So I decided it's time to try something different and give it a try with a pretty Bavarian style crusty pork roast. I took the idea and the original recipe from the current issue of the German magazine BEEF! and altered it a little bit. They got a pork special right now and all the recipes in there sounded pretty delicious.

For my first crusty pork roast it turned out pretty well. Not dry at all and with nice flavors (beer, caraway and maple syrup). And we have so many leftovers... Pork sandwiches it is!

Here is what you need for 6 people or tons of leftovers:

2.5kg pork roast from the shoulder (we got thigh/ham, that's fine as well)

1l beer (Lager, Pilsner)

1 tsp caraway

2 garlic cloves roughly chopped

2 onions roughly chopped

3 bay leaves

3 juniper berries

maple syrup (approx. 3-4Tbsp)

salt, pepper

Directions:

Preheat oven to 175°C

1. Pour water in a wide pot or pan to about 3cm height. Bring to boil.

2. place the pork roast, skin side facing the bottom, in the pot and brew it for about 15 minutes.

Be careful not to accidentally burn the skin while brewing already, like I did...

3. Now with a sharp knife cut the skin horizontally and vertically to create little skin cubes...

4. Put the roast with the skin side up in a deep baking tray or oven proof pan or pot and place the onions and garlic around the roast.

5. Bake for 2.5 hours.

6. After 15 minutes in the oven add about 1l of the water used for brewing the meat and add caraway, bay leaves, juniper berries, salt and pepper.

7. About 60 minutes later, crack the first beer (0.5 l) and pour over the roast.

8. 30 minutes before end pour the other 0.5 liters of beer over the roast.

9. 10 minutes before end brush the skin of the roast with maple syrup and turn the heat up to max. (be careful not to burn the roast!)

10. Remove roast from the oven and let it rest for 5-10 minutes.

11. In the meantime take some of the beer-onion liquid, blend it until smooth and reduce over heat to a nice sauce. Season to taste with salt, pepper and maple syrup if necessary.

Oh yeah, and pair with a bottle of good ice cold beer.

Serve the roast cut in slices with potatoes or green beans and sauce.

Notes: We served it with white asparagus. That was not the best fit. The asparagus tastes weird with the beer sauce. Better go with something more neutral like potatoes...

PS: I really miss my camera. Those cell phone photos are something else...

Guinness Pie (New York Times/Jamie Oliver)

Hopefully this is going to be the last wintery-cold weather recipe for the next six months at least.

Don't get me wrong. This pie tastes delicious. But I'm so looking forward to spring and seasonal food such as asparagus, strawberries, peaches, rasberries, arugula etc...

As I mentioned in my previous post, I haven't been cooking that much lately, or at least not that much new or worth posting. But luckily I have a very ambitious fiance in Wil, at least when it comes to all kinds of meat dishes. He is currently curing his third bacon (which we are going to smoke afterwards), made pork rillettes and his own trotter gear (which is part of this guiness pie recipe, as well).

And yes, Wil also prepared this Guinness Pie, which he found here in the New York Times.

He altered the original recipe a little bit, but, of course, I will provide you with the info (in red) of what he did different and how it affected the dish in the end.

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons butter

2 large red onions, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 carrots, peeled and chopped

2 ribs celery, chopped

- Wil used celeriac instead of celery, and added 3 medium potatoes, 1 large parsnip, 2 medium black radishes and 1 small violet turnip, and 1 small leek all chopped in bite-sized cubes and pieces.

10 mushrooms, trimmed and sliced

- Wil used dried wild mushrooms instead. They are much more flavorful than fresh cremini mushrooms or portobellos

3 pounds brisket (preferably second-cut) or stew meat, chopped into bite-size pieces

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons flour

1 sprig rosemary

About 4 cups (2 cans) Guinness or other stout

1 cup trotter gear (recipe to come!) or 8 ounces freshly grated Cheddar

For the pastry:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour  

- Wil used whole wheat flour, which gave the pie crust a much heartier flavor.

2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt 

- he added a pinch of sugar and a dash of cinnamon to the dough, to make it less bland.

1/2 cup (1 stick) very cold unsalted butter, diced

1 egg yolk, lightly beaten.

 Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

2. In a large, ovenproof pan fitted with a lid, heat 2 tablespoons of the butter over medium-low heat. Add the onions and garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until soft, about 10 minutes.

3. Add the carrots, celery/celeriac, potatos, parsnip, radishes, turnip, dried mushrooms and remaining 2 tablespoons butter and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the mushrooms are dark in color and the moisture released by them has evaporated, about 15 minutes (that doesn't count for the dried mushrooms, of course!).

4. Season the beef pieces all over with salt and pepper. Add the beef, flour (Wil coated the meat in the flour) and rosemary to the pan and cook/brown over high heat, stirring often, for about 5 minutes.

5. Add enough Guinness to just cover the beef. Cover the pan and put it in the oven for 1 1/2 hours. Remove from the oven and stir. If using trotter gear, stir it in now (Wil went a little heavier on the trotter gear. It's just too good and rich!). Return to the oven and cook for 1 hour more. If it remains thin, set the pan over medium-low heat, remove the lid and reduce the liquid. Season to taste with salt and pepper. If using Cheddar, fold in about half.

6. While the stew is cooking, prepare the pastry: sift together the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Using a pastry cutter or your hands, quickly work the butter into the dough until it is the texture of coarse meal. Add ice water, a splash at a time, until a firm dough forms. Wrap the dough in plastic and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

7. Place the dough between two sheets of plastic wrap and, using a rolling pin, roll to the thickness of a computer mouse pad. Pour the stew into an 8-inch-square, 2-inch-high Pyrex dish or a deep 9-inch pie pan. If using Cheddar, scatter the remaining cheese across the top. Place the dough on top of the pie and pinch it closed around the edges using the tines of a fork, then slash the center lightly with a knife. Brush with the egg yolk, place on a baking sheet and bake for 45 minutes, or until the pastry is puffy and golden.  

Serves 6. 

The original stew was adapted from Jamie Oliver; the original pastry was adapted from Fergus Henderson.

Notes: 

Feel free to go heavy on the spices and seasoning. If you decide to use paprika, that's great and will definitely be a good fit. But please remember that this will give your British stew certainly a Hungarian twist. That's not bad at all. But if you want to keep it British you may better want to save the paprika for your next Gulasch. I would suggest, instead of using it here to rather find spices other than paprika to finish up your Guiness pie, even if this seems to be a bigger challenge.

Regarding the pie crust, I can say, that we are still trying to find the recipe for the perfectly soft but at the same time crunchy crust. The dough also should be flavorful, but not compete with the stew flavors either.

The whole wheat with some sugar, salt and cinnamon was an excellent decision. But the consistency was still a little bit too caky. We'll work on that and let you know how it goes...

GURKEN-RADLER: Shandy with pickle lemonade...

Beer with lemonade made from pickle marinade.

That's what this is. Seriously.

It even tastes alright. You can tastes the pickles. A bit sweet. But quite refreshing. 

I couldn't drink more than one, though. 

So weird...

What they do is, they make a lemonade from the water-vinegar mix where the pickles marinate in, 

by probably adding sugar and carbon dioxide.

Oh, and as you can see, they also add green food colouring, 

which in my opinion is completely unnecessary.

Then they mix this lemonade with beer, and here you go:

PICKLE SHANDY!

Pork ribs and the very best barbecue sauce of the universe!

Today was the first real warm day of spring in Berlin. 

Me and Wil bought plants and seeds and prepared our balcony for spring and summer. 

Tomatos, basil, chive, thyme, radish and even soybeans...we've been busy planting and cannot wait for everything to sprout! Hopefully this year we will be luckier with our ras-, black- and strawberries as well.

Anyway, first warm day also means 

FIRST POTENTIAL BARBECUE DAY!

Therefore we cleaned our hibachi, got the coal ready, bought 2 kilos of pork ribs and I dug out my:

VERY BEST AND MOST FAVORITE 

(not existing) recipe for 

BARBECUE SAUCE (!) 

which is simply made by mixing ketchup, worcester sauce, maple syrup, orange juice, soy sauce, vinegar, beer, hot sauce, smoked and fried bacon bits, chopped onion, salt and pepper, and some brown sugar.

Just start with the ketchup and slowly add all the other ingredients until the taste makes sense and it's not too sour, not too salty and not too sweet, but still thick enough to stick on the meat.
You can add some starch dissolved in water to the boiling barbecue sauce to thicken it.
No, you don't necessarily have to boil it. I just did it in order to reduce and thicken the sauce...

I marinated the meat in the barbecue sauce for at least 1 hour (4 hours are better, overnight is perfect) then cooked it in our gas oven at its lowest (150 degrees celsius) for about 90 minutes  or until the meat almost comes off the bones.
In between I drizzled some of the barbecue sauce over the meat.
After that we threw it on the barbecue.

Don't panic if the meat turns black. 

That's just the burning sugar in the sauce.

It's definitely not healthy but it tastes sooo incredibly good!

Me and my partner Wil  both came to the conclusion that burned barbecue sauce is one of the best tasting things in the world.

Seriously.

We served the ribs with more  (reduced) barbecue sauce, drank cold beer and ate until we felt slightly nauseous.

Guess that's the price you
have to pay for good hearty food...

Beer and Honey marinated Pork roast stuffed with figs, olives, almonds and pine nuts

What you need:
900g pork back, de-boned
1 bottle of beer
1-1,5 Tbsp honey
3 Tbsp olive oil
1onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
90g bread cubes
4 dried figs, chopped
8 green olives, pitted and chopped
25g flaked almonds, roasted
25g pine nuts, roasted
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 Tbsp fresh chopped parsley
1 egg yolk
salt, pepper

Preheat oven to 200°C
Mix beer and honey in a bowl.
Place pork back in the bowl so that the meat is covered with the beer honey mix.
Marinate for 4 hours.
Heat up two Tbsp of olive oil in a pot and cook onions and garlic in it until soft.
Mix onions and garlic with bread cubes, figs, olives almonds, pine nuts, parsley, lime juice and egg yolk.
Use your hands for that!
Season with salt and pepper.

Spread half of the stuffing on flat inside part of the pork back.
Roll up the pork back starting with the thick part.
Use butcher´s string to wrap the pork roll.
Pour one Tbsp of olive oil in a roasting tray.
Place the meat in it and pour a bit (100ml) of the beer-honey mix over it.
Cook for 60 minutes.
Take the other half of the stuffing and form little balls/dumplings.
Place the balls/dumplings next to the pork roast in the tray and cook or another 15 minutes.
Take the roast out of the oven and let it rest for ten minutes.
Slice the pork roast and serve it with the balls/dumplings and the beer-honey sauce from the tray.

My pork roast turned out to be a bit too dry.
Unfortunately pork tempts to do that...
This is what you can do to prevent the meat from drying out:

1. Take meat with enough fat. Fat makes meat tender. So don't shy away from fatty meat.You want your roast to taste good, right? Some fat (we are not talking about thick layers or chunks of fat, just some "fat leftovers"!) will help making the meat soft and juicy.
2. Marinate!The longer the better!
3. use a roasting tray with a lid. In Germany we have something called "Römertopf", a clay pot that you soak in water for ten minutes before using it. The water evaporates in the closed pot keeping the meat moist.
4. slow-cook! 200°C is too hot in my opinion.Take your time and cook it slow using 80-120°C. That takes longer (probably 3 to 4 hours). But it's for the best, believe me!And it will prevent you from having dried out meat, like I had (I should have known better...). Also if you slow-cook you can use less fatty meat! whoa.