German · Main
Schweinshaxe
- Intermediate
- 3 h 30 m
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, char used as punctuation.
Ingredients
- 2 pork knuckles (hind hocks), skin on, scored in a diamond pattern
- Caraway seeds, salt, pepper, 1 head garlic
- 2 onions, quartered; 500ml dark beer
- Potato dumplings and mustard to serve
- A cold beer for the cook, Bavarian law
The skills inside
Roasting in a hot ovenThe broiler: heat from aboveStraining & passing through a sieveThe overnight rest: letting a dish marry
The words inside
Beer Styles: The Two-Family MapCaraway & Nigella
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · mustard · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rub knuckles with salt, caraway, crushed garlic; rest overnight uncovered in the fridge.
- Roast on the onion bed at 160°C, 2.5 h, adding beer to the pan as it evaporates. 300 min
- Crank to 230°C (or broil) for the final 20–30 min, basting with beer, until the skin blisters into amber glass. 30 min
- Rest briefly; serve with the beer-onion pan gravy, strained.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
The broiler: heat from above 22 recipes
- The element is fully lit and the compartment is hot before anything goes under it. A broiler switched on with the food already in place browns nothing for several minutes and then burns it in one.
- The distance was set before the dish went in, not adjusted afterwards with a hot dish in one hand: how close it sits is the only heat control this method has.
- Somebody stayed with it for the whole time. The window between pale and bitter is tens of seconds, and nothing under a broiler is ever safe to walk away from.
- The surface has coloured evenly right across, having been turned at least once; every grill has a hot corner and none of them say where it is.
- What is underneath is no further cooked than when it went in. Top heat is there to finish a surface, and anything that came out hotter all the way through was reheated rather than glazed.
Where it goes wrong It was treated as an oven setting: food in, timer set, cook walks away. Radiant heat from above has no gentle phase, so the surface goes from pale to bitter inside a minute while the inside is untouched, and there is no stage in between to catch.
The overnight rest: letting a dish marry 29 recipes
- Cooled quickly before it went in (spread out, decanted, or stood in cold water) rather than carried to the fridge hot in the pot it was cooked in.
- Protected from the rest of the fridge once cold: covered, or given space where nothing strong is sitting beside it. A rest this long is long enough to take on whatever it shares the shelf with, and some dishes want the open air.
- Given the whole time. This is the one technique whose entire content is waiting, and cutting it short leaves the dish exactly as it was when it went in.
- Brought back deliberately: reheated gently, or brought up to the temperature it is meant to be eaten at, rather than served straight out of the cold because it is late.
- Tasted and corrected AFTER the rest. Seasoning and brightness both flatten in the cold, so the dish is finished at the end of the wait rather than at the start of it.
Where it goes wrong It went into the fridge hot and covered. It held its own heat for hours in the range where food spoils, and the lid sweated and dripped back into it all night: what comes out is duller and wetter than what went in, which is the exact opposite of the point.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner or dry Riesling
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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