Danish · Main
Stegt Flæsk med Persillesovs
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 800 g pork belly, rind off, in 6 mm slices
- 10 g fine salt
- 1 kg waxy potatoes, peeled
- 40 g butter
- 40 g plain flour
- 500 ml whole milk
- 40 g flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
- 3 g salt and white pepper
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceRoasting in a hot ovenSalted water & the float test
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
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
- Lay the slices in a single layer on a cold rack over a cold tray, salt them lightly, and slide them into a cold oven set to 200C (390F).
- Roast 25 to 35 minutes, turning once, until the fat is glassy and a slice snaps when you bend it instead of folding over. 35 min
- Boil the potatoes in salted water until a knife meets no resistance, then drain and hold them covered.
- Melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook 2 minutes until it smells of biscuit but has taken no colour, then add the milk in three lots, whisking smooth between each. 2 min
- Simmer the sauce 10 minutes, stirring, until it coats a spoon and tastes of milk rather than flour; season, then stir the parsley in off the heat. 10 min
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.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chenin Blanc (Vouvray sec)
- 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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