Most people will tell you that the best thing to do to a pork hock is boil it. Well, they’ve obviously never roasted one. I have: and it’s amazing. Really amazing. Soft, sticky, unctuous meat with the crunchiest crackling, this is how roast pork should be. I implore you to try it. No, I don’t, I demand you to. Not immediately, unless you have one handy, but soon. Let’s say by the end of the week. How’s that? I’m nothing if not fair.

You could serve it with some roast potatoes and a bit of gravy. And I’d admire you for it. Or you could do what I did. Which is this.

Thai-style pork hock salad with crackling and prawns

For the salad

1 pork hock.
12 tiger prawns, cooked.
A handful of cherry tomatoes, halved.
2 sticks of lemongrass, finely sliced.
3 lime leaves, finely sliced. (Cut away the stalks first.)
2/3 of a long cucumber, seeds chucked and flesh sliced.
Half a banana shallot, finely sliced.
A handful of radishes sliced lengthwise.
A small carrot, cut into thin strips.
A big handful of mint leaves, picked.
A big handful of coriander leaves, picked.

For the dressing

Half a large clove of garlic.
2 thin, long red Thai chillies, de-seeded if you want to be safe.
3 to 4 teaspoons of palm sugar.
2 juicy limes. More if they disappoint.
Some fish sauce.

To finish

2 teaspoons of ground, roasted rice (Optional but nice. And easy enough to make.)

Method

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius (gas mark six) and put a large saucepan of water on the hob to boil. Take the hock, score the skin in regular intervals and plunge it into the boiling water. Make sure all the fat is submerged. Simmer it for two minutes and take out.

Season it all over with salt and pepper, put it on a baking tray and shove it in the oven to roast. After two hours, pump the heat up to 220 (gas mark seven) for half an hour, or until the crackling looks crunchy.

Now make the dressing. Take a pestle and mortar and add a small pinch of salt along with the garlic and chillies. Pound them into a rough paste. Now add the juice of two limes, around the same volume again of fish sauce and three teaspoons of the palm sugar. Dissolve the sugar into the dressing by crushing and mixing with the pestle. Taste it. It should taste equally hot, salty, and sour with a bit of sweetness rounding it off. Some limes are juicier than others, and batches of fish sauce vary in saltiness, so feel free to adjust the proportions.

Next: prepare the rest of the raw salad ingredients and add them to a large bowl.

By now, your glorious pork hock should have cooled a bit. Remove the crackling and break into bite-sized bits. Pull the meat off the bone and slice it up quite thinly. You don’t have to put all the meat in the salad. I put a third of it aside, shredded it, and made a version of this.

Add the prawns, pork and crackling to the bowl, along with the dressing and the ground roasted rice, if you’re using it. Mix it well with your hands and eat it straight away with a fork.

By the way, I should credit Mark Hix, here. This recipe was inspired by a brilliant Vietnamese-style creation of his, what I made once.

{ 0 comments }