Recipe - Sage roasted free range pork belly

I bought some free range pork from the delightful folk at Ormiston Free Range Pork who are based in Mudgee but we do have lovely free range meats at Your Local Markets on the Gold Coast in Queensland that you can use for this recipe.

This recipe is courtesy of Donna Hay's beautiful "Seasons" cookbook.  I've also added a homemade apple sauce to go with the pork.

Ingredients

Pork
2 heads of garlic (I used one)
1/4 cup olive oil
2.3 kg pork belly, on the bone (I used a kilo as there were only 2 of us)
1/3 cup sea salt flakes
4 bunches sage

Apple sauce
2 apples, peeled, cored and sliced into thin slices
1 cup water
3 tbs caster sugar
squeeze lemon juice
sprinkle of ground cinnamon

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C (350F).  Arrange the garlic over the base of a baking dish.  Rub the olive oil all over the pork and rub the salt into the skin.  Place skin side down on top of the garlic and cook for 3 hours.

While the pork is cooking, drop the apples, water, lemon juice, sugar and cinnamon into a saucepan.

Simmer over a low heat until water reduces significantly (so that you can just see the water amongst the apple pieces).  Cool and then blend or spoon into a food processor and blend until smooth.

Or you can leave it a little chunky if you like it like that. I blended mine into a smooth apple sauce.

Back to the pork: Increase the heat to 180C (355F).  Turn over the pork, add the sage.  and cook for a further 30 minutes or until the skin is golden and crunchy.

 

This was truly-ruly, voted by 2 roast pork piglets as "the best roast pork ever cooked in our house".

Serves 4-6, depending on how hungry and piggy your guest are ;-)