Getting super serious about crackling at Radmore Farm
Autumn is a great time for roasts – especially roast pork. Here, in our new column, Vicky Rogers reveals her method for creating delicious pork with super crispy crackling.
Hello and welcome to My Family & Other Hungry Animals. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Vicky Rogers from Radmore Farm Shop in Victoria Avenue, Cambridge. My job titles include city farm shop owner, country farmer, baker, blog writer, lover of feeding people and eating food, wife to Ben, and mum to Arthur and Leo.
In short, my life revolves around farming, family and food. Is there anything else to life?
We live on the farm with all our hungry animals. We also butcher, bake, grow, collect and create on the farm and Ben delivers all our goodies to Cambridge.
It was our dream to lead ‘the good life’ and run a business from what we can produce on our farm. We were 21 years old when we started, and we still love it after 11 years – three different shop premises, many hours of lost sleep, and two small children.
We love producing to the highest welfare standards, we love sustainability, we love creating new meals and we love community. But mostly we love sitting down to dinner with our family, and feeling proud that we have put the food on the tables of many other happy families too.
This brings me onto my favourite season of the year. This one right now, autumn. When your breath steams up when you go outside to let the hens out in the morning, and when you start to get crisp grass under foot, dewy spider webs, and dark snuggly evenings by the fire.
Autumn allows us to open the door to all that beautiful winter comfort food. The sort that you can slow cook all day, so your house feels warm and smells delicious. We love the soups, stews, slow-cooked chilli and casseroles. But most of all, it’s about the roasts.
When I was growing up, mum and dad owned the farm and it was a large-scale pig farm back then. Every few months, mum would travel to a butcher in Coventry that bought our pigs to ‘get a pig done up for the freezer’. This was something that used to be popular because everyone had chest freezers and it was so much more cost-effective to buy in bulk – especially for us as we provided the pig.
Roast pork loin with serious crackling
(This will serve four with leftovers)
Ingredients
Pork loin on the bone (4-6 inch piece). Alternatively, boned and rolled 1.5kgs
Mixed fresh herbs (I used parsley, thyme and sage)
Smoked garlic, two large cloves
Sea salt flakes (I used Maldon)
Water - 1 cup
Method
1. Pre-heat oven to 190C. Leave the pork open, out of its packaging for a few minutes, so the skin can dry out, or alternatively pat dry with kitchen paper. The skin needs to be dry to get good crackling.
2. Put the meat in a roasting tin, with the skin up.
Throw the stems of herbs in around the meat, no need to chop as this is so they can release their flavour while cooking.
3. Crush the smoked garlic and leave in its skin, this is where all the smoky flavour is, and again it’s to enhance the pork.
4. Pour a cup of water in around the base of the meat, so there’s about ½ to one inch of water in the bottom of the tray. This means the water evaporates during cooking and keeps the meat moist.
5. Liberally sprinkle sea salt all over the skin. This draws the moisture out during cooking and makes crispy crackling.
6. Loosely cover with foil and put in the oven for two hours.
7. After two hours, remove the tinfoil, top up the cooking water if required and put back in the oven, turned up to 220C for a further 30 minutes or until the meat is fully cooked. This raise in temperature is what will make your crackling serious!
8. Remove from the oven and leave to stand uncovered for 10 minutes before carving.
9. Remove the cracking from the joint before slicing it up. If you have pork on the bone then remove those bones before carving – and if you cut the bones of in one piece, that’s your own rack of mini baby back ribs to whoever wins it.
To really be successful with cracking make sure you choose a joint that isn’t too lean as the fat under the skin is a must for good crackling. Enjoy!
Mum and the butcher would chat, and I always remember him referring to how much pork he was selling depending on whether there was an ‘r’ in the month.
At the time my 12-year-old self found this very peculiar. But now I get it, and not only get it, I embrace it. Yes, you might have the odd sausage or stir fry but let’s face it, pork is for roasts. So, I thought I’d share how I make roast pork loin with some serious crackling. It’s one of the things in the shop we get asked most regularly. We are trying to be a bit healthier but the roast pork is non-negotiable.
But we did however swap roast potatoes for sweet potato mash, and a mountain of vegetables.
So, embrace the chilly mornings, get those ovens on, and get roasting some quality British pork. But most of all, enjoy a meal together with your family.
