Pork knuckle baked in different ways

Roast baked - the favorite Czech dish. There it is called a knee. But in the Russian cuisine they like to make a pork leg . It looks good on the festive table as the main dish, but also suitable for everyday life, as the secret of its preparation is simple. True, long. Because before baking, you need to fry the meat for a day or at least a night.

Each hostess has her own recipe for this dish: shank, baked in the oven in a "bare" form, in foil or in a culinary sleeve. Someone boils meat before putting it in the oven, and someone - an ardent follower of simple pickling. By the way, there are fifteen grocery pickles for pork shanks: in beer, kvass, soy sauce with honey, etc. But the general process of preparing the dish is one. We act in this algorithm: meat is mine, dried, garlic (or garlic and prunes), put in a marinade. After some time we take out and bake in the oven, preheated to 200 ° C, for about an hour. We try to prepare a fork with long teeth or a wooden stick: from the easily piercing product, colorless juice should be allocated, and not blood.

It seems that everything is simple, but there are a lot of secrets that should be known to make the baked pork knuckle come out soft, tender, but with a rosy, roasted skin.

First, pickle. If you do not have time to wait all day and you want to bake meat in two to three hours, use salt to wash it. Mix it with equal parts of black pepper, rosemary, turmeric, oregano, add mustard (if desired, and can also soy sauce) into this powder and cover the knee from all sides. But before this pour in garlic. To do this, use a knife with a narrow tip. Make a shallow cut on the pork and in the holes that are formed, poke a quart or half of the clove of garlic. Finished garlic meat is ready to bake in a few hours.

If you decide to do the heat treatment of pork the next morning, you do not need to salt the marinade. A handle baked with whole skin will get fatter. In this case, it should not be spiked, but simply put the head of garlic next to it when baking or chop the garlic into a marinade (or grate the meat with vegetable garlic clotted with garlic). If you want to get a more dietary product, before sending the knee into the oven you should cross-cut the incisions on the skin to drain excess fat - the pork is fried in this case a little faster.

A pork roast baked in foil or a sleeve does not require regular overturning, but then the skin will be pale and ugly. 20 minutes before the readiness to get meat from the "clothes" and bake already in the "bare form", to form an appetizing tan and even a crisp. If you know for your oven is so weak that it roasts the dishes from below, lay the pork on a pillow from the halves of the bulbs or from the thick slices of chopped potatoes.

And, at last, the economy-option: pea soup and shank baked from one piece of meat. Pork is boiled in unsalted water with a bulb in the shell until completely ready, removing the foam. We use soup under the soup base, and we dry it with a paper towel, garlic, we rub it with salt and put it in a mixture of soy sauce (1-2 cups), liquid honey (several table spoons), lemon juice and pepper sauce. Marinated boiled meat quickly, enough half an hour. Bake it should also not for long - about 15-20 minutes, until a golden crust is formed.