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Nov. 12th, 2008 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickLicious food item.
Today's licious food item is a Pork Roast With Allium Gravy.
You will need a hunk of pork loin sized suitable for a roast. It should be six inches long or so at a minimum. (Smaller than that won't really work for this.) If you're picking one out at the store, try to get one with more fat on the top than not. If you're shopping from your freezer, take what you can get but you do need six linear inches of pork loin to make this fly. Five at a bare minimum.
Thaw the hunk of pork loin, if needed.
Put thawed hunk of pork loin in smallish dutch oven baking container. (They're oval, enameled black with specks over metal. A dutch oven has a lid that fits it well.) Surround pork loin hunk with pieces of onion. I used half a big white onion, cut into thirds so that the pieces were big wedges and not collections of C shapes. (The way the onion is cut up is not particularly important for anyone but me.) Also add in about eight cloves of garlic, peeled. You can just leave the garlics whole. Because pork loin is an extremely lean cut (most loin roasts don't have enough fat to make decent gravy), add about a tablespoon of lard to the dutch oven container. (Lard is made of pork fat. You're adding pork fat to help along the pork loin, which is not inclined to make gravy on its own. Wimps can use olive oil, but dude, you're already eating pig, This meal is not the vegetarian option so you might as well go whole hog. Also, lard tastes better. It does.)
Cover, and place the lot in the oven at 275 for rather a while. When it starts to smell pretty good (thirty minutes? forty? It was a while.), open up the oven and look at it. Stick a sharp knife in the meat, see what color juice you get. It should be close to running clear at this point. Anyway, bake it a while and then check to see how things are doing once it starts to smell prettyy good. There probably won't be any browning or crisping or anything, but you should have some pan juices. (If you do NOT have pan juices, I don't know what you did wrong. You suck.)
Once you've got a decent amount of pan juices, remove the lid and bake another fifteen or twenty minutes to let the top of your roast get crispy brown and let the oven reduce the sauce a little.
When the pork loin is done cooking or when you've decided it is done and everything is suitably browned, remove it from the oven. Take the pork loin out of the dutch oven and set it aside for a bit to rest. While it's doing that, pour the drippings, including the garlics and onion pieces, from the dutch oven into a frying pan. Then, deglaze the dutch oven with a small amount of water and the scraping action of a fork. Get all the brown and cripsy bits, there. Pour that stuff into the frying pan, too. Turn the heat under the frying pan and proceed to thicken the contents of the frying pan with a flour-n-water whitewash, adding salt and pepper as needed. Bring the frying pan sauce to a boil to get rid of the raw taste of the flour. You're making gravy here. It is not rocket science. It's gravy. You can do it. It will taste like pork gravy with a heavy note of oven-roasted onions and garlic. Mmm, licious.
As soon as you have gravy, slice the pork loin into 3/4" slices or thereabouts and serve with gravy ladled over the top of each one. There should be enough gravy, if you don't slop it all over like a greedy oinker, to have gravy on every piece of pork loin AND ALSO on a plain potato the day after all the pork slices are gone in a "remembrance of things past" moment of Proustian goodness.
Today's licious food item is a Pork Roast With Allium Gravy.
You will need a hunk of pork loin sized suitable for a roast. It should be six inches long or so at a minimum. (Smaller than that won't really work for this.) If you're picking one out at the store, try to get one with more fat on the top than not. If you're shopping from your freezer, take what you can get but you do need six linear inches of pork loin to make this fly. Five at a bare minimum.
Thaw the hunk of pork loin, if needed.
Put thawed hunk of pork loin in smallish dutch oven baking container. (They're oval, enameled black with specks over metal. A dutch oven has a lid that fits it well.) Surround pork loin hunk with pieces of onion. I used half a big white onion, cut into thirds so that the pieces were big wedges and not collections of C shapes. (The way the onion is cut up is not particularly important for anyone but me.) Also add in about eight cloves of garlic, peeled. You can just leave the garlics whole. Because pork loin is an extremely lean cut (most loin roasts don't have enough fat to make decent gravy), add about a tablespoon of lard to the dutch oven container. (Lard is made of pork fat. You're adding pork fat to help along the pork loin, which is not inclined to make gravy on its own. Wimps can use olive oil, but dude, you're already eating pig, This meal is not the vegetarian option so you might as well go whole hog. Also, lard tastes better. It does.)
Cover, and place the lot in the oven at 275 for rather a while. When it starts to smell pretty good (thirty minutes? forty? It was a while.), open up the oven and look at it. Stick a sharp knife in the meat, see what color juice you get. It should be close to running clear at this point. Anyway, bake it a while and then check to see how things are doing once it starts to smell prettyy good. There probably won't be any browning or crisping or anything, but you should have some pan juices. (If you do NOT have pan juices, I don't know what you did wrong. You suck.)
Once you've got a decent amount of pan juices, remove the lid and bake another fifteen or twenty minutes to let the top of your roast get crispy brown and let the oven reduce the sauce a little.
When the pork loin is done cooking or when you've decided it is done and everything is suitably browned, remove it from the oven. Take the pork loin out of the dutch oven and set it aside for a bit to rest. While it's doing that, pour the drippings, including the garlics and onion pieces, from the dutch oven into a frying pan. Then, deglaze the dutch oven with a small amount of water and the scraping action of a fork. Get all the brown and cripsy bits, there. Pour that stuff into the frying pan, too. Turn the heat under the frying pan and proceed to thicken the contents of the frying pan with a flour-n-water whitewash, adding salt and pepper as needed. Bring the frying pan sauce to a boil to get rid of the raw taste of the flour. You're making gravy here. It is not rocket science. It's gravy. You can do it. It will taste like pork gravy with a heavy note of oven-roasted onions and garlic. Mmm, licious.
As soon as you have gravy, slice the pork loin into 3/4" slices or thereabouts and serve with gravy ladled over the top of each one. There should be enough gravy, if you don't slop it all over like a greedy oinker, to have gravy on every piece of pork loin AND ALSO on a plain potato the day after all the pork slices are gone in a "remembrance of things past" moment of Proustian goodness.
