Having had a new Blanco oven installed just the other day, we needed a serious meal to celebrate the oven. Having recently purchased Jamie Oliver's "Jamie at Home"; where he uses his outdoor wood oven a lot, we scanned the book for something fitting. Now personally, I've always liked Jamie's meals over the years, though there are some that would clearly not be my kind of thing; this new series though is both beautifully presented and themed and also has a strong aspect of using organic and free-range ingredients, which always strikes a cord with me. So the we found the recipe which we thought was most fitting for breaking in our oven "Balsamic-baked onions and potatoes with roast pork", for owners of the DVD, its Episode 3 - Onions.
Now a meal this special needed special ingredients. So after a few conversations at work it was decided, we needed Berkshire Free Range Pork, grown by 3 families in the Barossa Valley, famous in Japan, old fashioned flavour that's very juicy and succulent. The "black pig" breed dates back 300 years to the swine heard of the House of Windsor, and is being praised by chefs across the world. Luckily Feast Fine Foods had this pork available and we put in an order for 1.5kg of boneless rolled pork loin, which we picked up the night before, and yes, it cost about the same as your average new release Nintendo Wii game. But this was a meal where we would cut no corners (and it would probably last for 2 meals anyway!).
For the other ingredients we visited Real Organics on the Parade, Norwood which is not only convenient but has a surprisingly large selection of organic produce and other essential items. Here we purchased Sebago potatoes, beautiful bulbs of fragrant garlic, B.D. Farms Paris Creek bio-dynamic organic butter, red onions, rosemary, celery and some Absolute Organics Balsamic Vinegar. The white wine, sea salt, ground black pepper and fennel seeds we had at home already.
So while the feature wine for the night, Grant Burge's Holy Trinity 2002 was being decanted (39% Grenache, 36% Shiraz and 25% Mourverdre with a James Halliday rating of 94); we pre-heated the oven to 200 degrees and put our pans in there to heat up. The Blanco has a superb feature of actually indicating when its reached the preset temperature which took some of the guess work out of using a new oven. We peeled the potatoes and cooked them in salty water for just under 10 minutes and then drained them, also cutting up the onions and crushing a bulb of garlic, and chopping up the celery.
The pork was beautiful already, and we scored a criss-cross pattern over it. The chopping board was covered with the chopped rosemary, ground fennel seeds, sea salt and cracked pepper and then the pork was rolled across it, pressing down for the flavouring to stick. This was put in the roasting tray with some olive oil for a moment to get the fat going, and then some garlic cloves cut roughly, celery and onion were added (we realised we ran out of bay leaves too late into the process). And then straight into the very hot oven.
An epic amount of rosemary was chopped up finely and the fennel seeds were ground for a while.
The potatoes had a beautiful pure shimmer to them. We love potatoes.
Crushed garlic, more chopped rosemary and 200g of butter sizzling away in the hot tray, ready for the veggies!
The potatoes and onions were added about a large dose of balsamic vinegar was added, close to half the bottle. And then it all went into the oven; and even though Jamie said to do it for an hour, we put it in for about 90 minutes to be sure, by which stage the juices ran clear when it was pricked with a knife. We also turned the pork over half way to give both sides a decent roasting; using the fan assisted mode of the oven to allow a consistent temperature throughout.
And the end result? An absolute marvel, who could possibly deny roasted vegetables with the balsamic caramelized all over?
Just look at this meat. The rosemary and fennel just stuck to it so very well, and the quality of the Berkshire pork was unbeatable. So very traditional, rich, buttery and tasty. I'm quite sure this is the best meal, and definitely the best roast I have ever, ever had, and I've certainly had my fair share of those.
As a final touch, some of the fat was removed from the meat tray, and we mashed the garlic and onions. To this we added two glasses of white cooking wine and put it back in the oven for ten minutes or so. During this time we sliced up the pork and added the incredibly baked onions and potatoes (while i couldn't help myself and snacked away on the roasted garlic cloves), and when it was all cut we added some of the tasty sauce over the top of it all. Very highly recommended overall, this is a meal that would probably be stunning even without top quality ingredients, but if you want to do it right, get the best veggies (or organic) that you can find and give the Berkshire pig a try. Jamie gets top marks for now too, with 2 meals out of this book being absolute stunner so far!
Recipe cooked from:Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life
Publisher: Michael Joseph Ltd; Tv Tie-in edition (6 Sep 2007)
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