Difficulty 3/5
This pork recipe is really tasty! The only difficult part and the only reason this recipe is 3/5 is the filling of the pork loin, but it’s worth it to learn how to do it. Once you ge tthe hang of it, you can use it to stuff different things and it’s very useful. The mushroom sauce goes amazing with it, and with some rice to soak in it, it’s just a dream come true.
Portions: approx 5 people
Ingredients:
– 1 pork loin (typically 450g)
– 80g pecans
– 250g onions
– leaves from 8 springs of thyme
– 20ml olive oil
– salt and pepper to taste
For the sauce:
– 50ml water
– 250g white mushrooms
– 200ml whipping cream
– salt and pepper to taste
Procedure:
1. Cut the onion in small cubes and cook in the olive oil on medium-low heat until they are nice and translucent. Then add the thyme leaves.2. Toast the pecans in the oven at 140C until they are lightly golden and start giving out their smell. Then chop them and add them to your onions. Season with salt and pepper.3. Clean the loin, removing all silver skin and excess fat from the outside. Keep any pieces of meat you might remove, we’ll use them later for flavour.4. Make a cut along the loin going 3/4 down the center and then to either side the same distance from the first cut you made. This will open up the cut nicely. Stuff it with the cold mix of onions and pecans (or it will cook the meat) and close it using a piece of string. The best way to do it is to tie both ends and then the middle, then adding more in the middle of these. This way you don’t get overflow.5. Once it’s nice and tied up, heat up the vegetable oil really high, and put your stuffed loin in. Make it golden on all sides. 6. Put this on a baking tray and it goes into the oven at 180C for around 20min. Don’t was that pan just yet! You can do a test cut to make sure that the center is cooked. Or alternatively, if you have a meat thermometer, cook it to 63C, then you know all bacteria are killed and it will still be juicy. Once it comes out of the oven, it NEEDS TO REST at least 10min, or it will fall apart when you slice it.
7. Put those extra meat pieces on the pan where you cooked the pork before (if you have any left). The golden bits that are left behind will give our sauce much more flavour.8. Remove the pork pieces and any excess of fat from the pan, and add the water to it. Unstick any remainders from frying off the pan with the help of the water. Let this boil until there’s almost nothing left.
9. Slice the mushrooms and put them to cook in the pan. They’ll let go of water and let this go almost to nothing as well.
10. Finally add the cream and season with salt and pepper to taste.
Now all you have left to do is cut the string off the loin and slice it nicely. I recommend that when you slice it, the opening is facing down. I loved this dish, and the people who I invited over to eat it (it was too much for me and my boyfriend!) loved it too, so there you go 🙂