Lucky dip - crackling
"fat is a largely a textural pleasure, like chicken's feet or water biscuits, and pork crackling is surely the supreme example of this: a blistered top, as dry and crunchy as an autumn leaf, hiding a layer of yielding, creamy fat beneath. There can be no greater disappointment in a cook's repertoire than sub-standard, flabby crackling; such wasted potential is enough to make you weep" Felicity Cloake
I'm feeling uninspired - even with a list of potential subjects in my notebook but none of them appealed. So I did my usual lucky dip thing but for the first time I have cheated slightly in that the book I picked was Cuisine MInceure - and I've done that before. Mind you I have also done Donna Hay's The New Classics before, but by then I was feeling guilty for having rejected my first pick so I stayed with it. Besides it's a big book that weighs a ton, so I thought there would be ample stuff to choose from.
Anyway long preamble. Moving on - the page I picked was headed How to cook pork roast which sounds very teacherly but wasn't really. There weren't any step by step instructions other than one would normally expect, although there were a couple of pictures showing (a) the scored fat, and (b) the tied roast. The recipe was for Rosemary and mustard roasted pork loin. I cannot find the recipe online, but it's very simple:
The meat is boneless. Score the fat, rub the meat side with 1 tbsp hot mustard and 4 sprigs chopped rosemary, salt and pepper and roll up and tie. Rub skin with salt and put in fridge overnight, uncovered. Preheat oven to 220ºC, brush off salt, pat dry, brush with oil and salt well into cuts. Roast for half an hour, turn down to 200ºC, add 3 halved heads of garlic and cook for 15-25 minutes more. Done. And this is what it should look like:
So far so apparently simple. But I thought, just to be sure I would look it up - because although my mum seemed to be able to produce perfect pork crackling every time, I never have. Indeed I have given up, telling myself it's unhealthy so I shouldn't be eating it anyway. And, of course, like every other 'basic' and 'simple' thing in the world it isn't that simple.
Felicity Cloake, as usual, sums it all up admirably and she found seven different ways of producing the perfect crackling. I'm sure there are more. I think what I got from reading her article was that:
You must score the fat - according to Felicity Cloake this was the only thing that everyone agreed on.
"everyone tells you to score the rind, usually using a Stanley knife, in vertical lines about a finger's width apart. This is to allow the heat to penetrate the fat, and, as it bubbles up through the cuts, to baste the top during cooking. If you cut too far down, and reach the meat, you will allow juices to escape as well, which is obviously much less desirable." Felicity Cloake
I can certainly vouch for the difficulty of this step. Pork fat is incredibly difficult to cut through. In times gone by you would have got your butcher to do it for you, and I think sometimes you might find that the supermarket has. So yes, a Stanley knife is a good idea.
Your meat and fat must be dry, dry, dry and the most usual way was to leave it in the fridge overnight, after having patted it dry, uncovered. Some rubbed salt in, some didn't.
"Having rubbed salt into the rind as if "the pork was somebody [I'm] particularly fond of who is demanding a lovely exfoliating massage" (rather than Fanny Cradock's "as if into the face of your worst enemy") Felicity Cloake
You start off in a very hot oven and then turn it down. No basting while it cooks.
But there were lots of areas of disagreement - do you rub that salt in before the fridge, after the fridge, not at all? And is putting it in the fridge the best way to dry it anyway. It turns out that in her test, the winning version had used a hair dryer to dry it!
And if you think that's weird try Heston Blumenthal's way. The guys on this website used the recipe in Heston at Home. It took three days to prepare and eighteen hours - yes eighteen hours to cook. Do read the article though. The website is called In Search of Heston - one of those sites working their way through a favourite chef's recipe. This recipe has lots of illustrations of the different stages. The finished product looked pretty good but it was a major, and difficult exercise.
At the other end of the spectrum you have the latest Coles magazine which has two different versions of roast pork with crackling - Roast Pork with No-fail Crackling and Apple Jelly Gems, and Roast Pork Belly with Sage and Thyme (no recipe online but you can download the magazine).
The first is a recipe from Curtis Stone so I suppose it has more kudos, but both recommend drying in the fridge overnight but without the salt. As does Delia I might add. Delia scoffs at the idea of the salt saying that it will pull out the moisture to the surface. Which is sort of contradictory, because I think the aim is to pull out the moisture and if you pat it dry as well you remove any extra moisture which might have been pulled out of the meat. Anyway, I would say, that on balance leaving it in the fridge overnight seemed to be the thing to do. And going back to Coles - interestingly the second recipe started out with a relatively low temperature and finished off with a high one. Which I suppose is similar to those who proposed grilling it - or even microwaving it at the end.
So there you go - pork crackling. Take your pick. I tried to find out who first thought of it, but it's probably just one of those things that happened by accident back in caveman times - well not the salt. And I'm not talking here about 'scratchings' which are the same but different. Another time.
"There are two simple things necessary for crackling: a nice dry rind, and a good thick layer of fat underneath it." Simon Hopkinson
