CRACKLING

 

Having had the joy of the Pork Belly Bites at the Cricketers in Richmond, the obvious next step was to try making some in the privacy privacy of our own kitchen and in our own frying pan, with the help of my trusty assistant Caroline, who took most of these photographs. 

 

The local butcher supplied the belly:

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, if in fact it sounds easy at all.  Cooking the pork was no problem in itself because you could lay it on its side, but the crackling didn’t get as crisp as we wanted because it was so hard to keep it upright in the pan.

Also we had it as a main course with asparagus and home-made apple sauce rather than as a starter so it was more a nodding homage than a recreation of the Cricketers ‘small plate.’

 

The apples in the apple sauce were from my pal Colin who has an allotment down Colchester way, and fans of pareidolia will note that one of the apples appeared to have a map of India on it (sort of):

Anyway the end result was good, but we concluded that perhaps those Richmond bites were pre-cooked then deep-fat-fried at the last moment to make the crackling really crisp.  And although I used to have a deep fat fryer, and often think about buying another one, I never quite get round to it.

 

A week later we tried simply to make roast pork, and of course tried to get the crackling right.  This is something that’s been haunting me my whole life, with mixed results, but I have to say this was one of my better efforts. A small triumph but one to be cherished.

 

My mum, who was not a very good cook and didn’t want to be, did have a way with crackling, and the more I think about it, the more I think it had something to do with the cooking fat she used which i was lard. We were ‘reduced’ to using duck fat.