Belly pork, pot-roasted

The best way to produce meltingly tender meat from a joint such as lamb shoulder or belly pork, in my oven, is to pot-roast it. The heat inside a heavy casserole is lower than the oven temperature at the lowest setting (about 130C). See also Foil and slow roasting.

You can get good pork crackling, too. Following a long quest for crackling perfection (I have written numerous entries on the subject), I have so far yet to record a failure after rubbing vinegar over the skin. The theory behind this technique is that the acid helps to break down the collagen, the protein that provides the skin's rubbery texture.

I had a 1.2kg piece of belly pork, which serves four people easily.

Try to leave the pork uncovered for a while, with salt sprinkled on the skin. When you’re ready to cook the joint, use a paper towel to wipe off the moisture that the salt will have drawn out. Smear a little oil on the meaty underside. Smear a tbsp of vinegar on the skin. Season all over with salt and pepper. You may like to use fennel, too.

Put the belly pork into a grill pan, and grill the skin until it starts to brown.

Slice two onions into rings, mix them with a little oil, and put them into a heavy casserole. Lay the bellow pork on top, put on the lid, and cook at the lowest possible heat at the bottom of the oven, for five to six hours.

Slice off the skin, return the pork to the casserole, and cover to keep warm. Turn the oven to its highest setting, put the skin in a dish or on a baking sheet, and bake until it is crunchy.

The meat from the joint should be tender enough to cut with a spoon.

Risotto with chorizo

A fusion – is this word still fashionable in cookery? – of Italian and Spanish. Serves 2.

Chicken stock
Olive oil
4 cooking chorizos, sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 red onion, sliced
1 red pepper, deseeded and cut into fork-sized pieces
200g Arborio rice
Salt
4 heaped tbsp grated Parmesan, Pecorino, or Manchego

You’ll need about 700ml of chicken stock, or more. Bring it to simmering point in a saucepan.

Meanwhile, put a splash of olive oil in a heavy pan, and fry the chorizos over a gentle heat until they have started to brown and have exuded their rust-coloured fat. Throw in the garlic, onion, and pepper, and continue to cook until they are soft. Add more oil if necessary, but you may have enough.

Add the rice, and stir it with the vegetables and chorizo until hot. Now start adding the stock. Because of the quantity of extra ingredients, you may at first want more than the ladleful traditional in risotto cookery, in order to submerge all the rice and to get it to start to soften. The heat should be just high enough to keep the liquid at a moderate simmer. Wait until the stock is absorbed, and add some more, repeating the process until the rice becomes plump, but with a faint residual bite – 20 to 25 minutes. Add a little salt to taste; but remember that the sausage will be salty, as will the cheese.

Take the pan off the heat, stir in the cheese, and serve.

Roast chicken, with its stock

Prolific cookery writers produce innumerable recipes for roast chicken, so perhaps I may allow myself to publish what is not the first example of its kind to appear here. (My entry on Heston’s roast chicken is the most viewed item on this blog.) I tend to stick to a technique for a while, and then to move on to another one. This is my current favourite. The timing is for a chicken of 1.5kg.

Gently work loose the skin above the breast bone, insert a knob of butter, and try to push it around so that it smears the breast meat. Rub the outside of the chicken with a little oil (olive or vegetable). Shove into the cavity of the bird whatever flavouring agents you like – lemon, onion, garlic cloves, herbs. Season with salt and pepper.

Put the chicken into an oven dish, along with any giblets you have (apart from the liver), and a halved onion. Pour in (but not over the chicken) 200ml water. If you do not have giblets, cut off the wing-tips and use those.

Roast at gas mark 6/200C for about 30 minutes, by which time the skin should have started to brown. Turn the giblets and onion pieces. Continue to roast at gas mark 2/150C for a further hour – but check that the chicken is continuing to cook at a steady pace, adjusting the heat if necessary.

Remove the chicken from the dish, and pour the stock into a small saucepan, adding the giblets and onions too. Having removed the lemon/onion/herbs first, you can hold the chicken by the wings with paper towels in order to pour the juices from the cavity into the saucepan as well.

I have a grill drawer above my oven, and I keep the roasted chicken in there to keep warm. It will hold for at least half an hour.

If you have just the right amount of stock (which is your sauce), simmer it further in a covered pan. If you want to reduce it, simmer it in an uncovered pan. Or you could top it up with more water before simmering it.

Check the seasoning. Strain the stock/sauce into a heated jug, and serve with the chicken.

Spaghetti carbonara, plus

With pasta sauces, less is more. But sometimes, nutrition is as important a consideration as authenticity. With two daughters to feed, and having in the house the ingredients for a carbonara and only a few vegetables (including the remnants of a packet of frozen petit-pois), I produced this. Our tastes are not particularly refined. Serves 3.

Olive oil
350g spaghetti
Olive oil
150g pancetta, cubed
1/4 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 banana shallots, finely sliced
Bunch of purple sprouting broccoli, sliced from the top, with the toughest parts of the lower stems discarded
70g frozen petit pois
3 eggs, lightly beaten
Scraping of nutmeg
50g parmesan or pecorino, grated
Salt and pepper

Bring a large pan of water to the boil, salt it generously, and immerse the spaghetti, allowing the submerged portions to soften so you can stir in the rest. Cook at a lively boil, stirring regularly.

Meanwhile, gently fry the pancetta in a heavy pan in a splash of oil. Allow it to brown and shed its fat, then throw in the garlic and shallots. Stir regularly. The shallots should soften in four to five minutes.

Keep testing the spaghetti. (The packet instructions will give a rough guide to the cooking time, but cannot be taken as definitive.) When it is nearly ready, throw in the broccoli and peas. After a further minute and a half, tip the contents of the pan into a colander.

Tip the drained spaghetti, broccoli and peas into the pan with the pancetta and shallots. Toss everything. Turn off the heat, and pour in the eggs (to which you have added the nutmeg, and possibly salt and pepper – but go easy with the salt). Toss again, until the spaghetti mixture is coated with lightly curdled egg. Tip in the cheese, and toss again.

Bananas and Greek yoghurt

Many people like to swirl honey or golden syrup into their Greek (or “Greek-style”) yoghurt. To my taste, these additions smother the acidic edge that makes the yoghurt so delicious.

Instead, I add just a sprinkling of caster sugar. For a quick pudding, I use for each sliced banana 3tbsps of yoghurt and half a tsp of sugar.

Chocolate sponge cake

This chocolate cake is adapted from Cakes From Around the World (Grub Street) by Julie Duff, who says it is from Hungary. The differences from her recipe is that I used gluten-free flour (which is not for the gluten-intolerant only – you may find you prefer it), a little milk because this flour tends to make a stiffer mixture, and only half as much cream – with her quantity, I had far more filling than I wanted.

3 large eggs, separated (I had medium eggs, and used 4)
75g caster sugar
75g self-raising flour (gluten-free)
2tbsp cocoa powder
2-3tbsp milk
100g dark chocolate
300ml double cream (or 284ml, if that is the size of carton available)

Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 4/180C, and grease and line a 20cm springform cake tin (see here).

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar until pale and creamy. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks (see here).

Gradually stir the flour and cocoa powder into the egg yolk and sugar. Add a little milk until you have a liquid but stiff mixture. Fold in the egg white, and spoon the mixture into the cake tin.

Bake on a baking sheet in the centre of the oven until the middle of the cake is firm. (Duff’s timing is 20 minutes; my cake took 40.)

Leave for 10 minutes, then loosen the spring and leave the cake to cool, top side down, on a wire rack. Slice it in half.

Melt the chocolate in a small bowl over a saucepan of gently simmering water. Whisk the cream until stiff – you’ll find that it goes from thick to stiff very rapidly. Fold in the melted chocolate.

Spread this mixture over the base sponge. Place the other half gently on top. Put the cake into the fridge, to allow the filling to set.

Grilled peppers

I have tended to roast peppers rather than grill them, partly because it involves less effort, and partly because it softens the peppers more thoroughly. But it occurred to me that if I put the grill pan at the bottom of my grill drawer, and set the heat to low, I could probably cook the peppers thoroughly while also blackening the skins.

So it proved. The peppers required regular turning, but ended up soft and sweet; and – this was a big improvement over baked versions – they had skin that had puffed out from the flesh and was easier to peel.