Pork Belly Roll with Apricot & Fennel Stuffing
A delicious rolled pork belly roast with homemade stuffing, baked stone fruit, finished with decadent burnt butter sage. A seriously life changing flavour combo!
Ingredients
- 2kg Free range Boneless Pork Belly
- Butter
- 8 apricots (fresh is best but tinned will work if out of season)
- Fresh sage leaves (picked off stems)
Stuffing (amount for 2kg of pork)
- 1.5 slice of stale sourdough bread (cut/crumbled into small croutons)
- 1/2 a large brown onion
- 1 clove of garlic
- Filling from one pork sausage
- 1 tbsp orange juice
- 1 tsp honey
- 4 dried apricots cut into slivers
- 1/4 tsp fennel seeds ground
- 1/4 tsp Cinnamon powder
- Olive oil
- Salt
- Pepper
Method
- The day before your cook, take the belly roll out of its packaging and pour hot water over the skin (just the skin, be careful not to scald the meat!). This will help open up the pores of the meat for the salting process. Pat dry thoroughly with paper towels and rub salt into the skin, pressing especially into the scoring lines (all Cannings pork rolls come pre-scored!). Pop into the fridge uncovered overnight.
- On the day of your cook, take the meat out of the fridge ahead of cooking so it can lose its chill (if it's a hot day make sure it's in a cooler spot!) for a bit.
- Preheat oven to 220C fan forced (or as high as your oven goes if it doesn't go this high).
- Prep the stuffing (you could to this step + the rolling/tying the day before if you prefer). Chop onion and garlic, sauté in olive oil until going transparent and add bread, increase heat and stir until bread starts going brown. Add spices, apricot slivers, orange juice and honey. Cook off some of the moisture then set aside and allow to cool. Once cooled stir in the sausage mince until fully incorporated. If it doesn't hold together add a little water. Add a Pinch of salt and pepper.
- Add stuffing into the centre of your roasting piece (on the meat side, not skin side) in a line, then roll up your pork into a log. Tie cooking twine around each section of the pork to keep it in place during cooking (if you're not sure how to do this, google 'how to tie rolled pork' and there are lots of handy tutorials with pictures).
- Pop your roast onto a roasting tray with a sheet of baking paper, sprinkle with a bit more salt and slide into the oven and bake for 30 mins. After this time, turn the oven down to 170C and roast for a further 2 hours on 170C.
- Once you reach the final hour of cooking, add apricot halves in flat side down to roast.
- Once the cooking time is up, remove roast from the oven. If the crackle hasn't popped to your liking, you can put it under the grill but keep your eye on it! Crackle can go from perfect to burned very quickly under the griller!
- For the finishing touches, heat a big lump of butter in a pan on the stove, then when it's nice and hot, add sage leaves in and cook until butter is bubble and sage is just crisping up and changing colour. Pour burnt butter sage all over your roast and roasted apricots. Game changing flavour combo!
