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Roast pork with apple, apricot and pistachio stuffing
Serves 6-8 Starters and mains
Ingredients
- 2kg free-range pork loin, skin unscored
- sea salt
- 6-8 small apples
For the stuffing
- 1tbsp olive oil
- 1 brown onion, finely diced
- 3 garlic cloves, crushed
- 250g dried apricots, roughly chopped
- 3 green apples, peeled, cored and grated
- 140g shelled pistachios, roughly chopped
- handful each of flat-leaf parsley, thyme and sage leaves, finely chopped
- 280g fresh sourdough breadcrumbs
- 50g butter, melted
Method
Preheat the oven to 250˚C/500˚F/ Gas 9. To make the stuffing, heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat, add the onion and garlic and cook for 5-7 minutes or until slightly softened. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.
Place the apricots, apple, pistachios, herbs, breadcrumbs and melted butter in a bowl, add the cooled onion mixture and combine. Season well with sea salt and ground black pepper.
Place the pork loin on a clean work surface, skin-side up, and pat the skin dry with kitchen paper. Using a very sharp, small knife, score the skin widthways at 1cm intervals. Take a decent handful of sea salt and crumble it all over the scored skin, rubbing it really well into the cuts. Pat the salt all over the skin, then flip the meat over so the flesh side faces up.
Place handfuls of the stuffing on the pork meat, pressing it down as you go and adding as much as will fit, then gently roll up the loin to enclose the stuffing. Secure with a few lengths of kitchen string, then place in a flameproof roasting tin, seam-side down, surrounded by the small apples. If you have one, insert a meat thermometer into the thickest part of the pork.
Roast for 30 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 200˚C/400˚C/Gas 6. Roast for a further 30 minutes, then arrange the apples around the pork in the tin. Cook for another 30 minutes or so until the pork is cooked through and the apples have softened. (The pork is cooked if the juices run clear when the thickest part of the flesh is pierced with a skewer, or the internal temperature registers 73˚C/163˚F on a meat thermometer.) Set the pork aside for 20 minutes to rest before carving and serving.
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