Glazed Roast Pork Neck with a Gingery Fresh-Prune Relish

All week long I've been feasting on ripe plums, which are in high season in South Africa. Plums are among my favourite fruits, so I was ridiculously pleased to find a gleaming pile of prune plums in my local supermarket. They reminded me of this pork-neck dish, which I haven't made in a while, and I galloped home with pockets bulging, all eager to sling the roast in the oven and hover excitedly over a saucepan of simmering prunes.  I was dismayed, then infuriated, when I couldn't find my recipe on this blog - it had vanished into the void where lost blogposts go, and I'd long since thrown away my scribbled testing notes.

Luscious, dense-textured prune plums.

To my relief, I eventually found a copy of my recipe at Food24, together with some of the toe-curlingly amateurish photographs I made do with in my earlier days as a food-snapper.

 (I find it funny, in hindsight, that I'd branded one of the images with a copyright symbol and the name of my blog - as if anyone would want to nick a picture of such spectacular fuzziness. I've cropped that out to spare myself any further embarrassment,  and I suggest you do the same if you're in the habit of scrawling your name all over your images. Even top-notch professional photographers who have a great deal to lose if their online works are stolen have stopped doing this and  - let's face it - anyone who knows how to crop an image will hardly be deterred by that distracting little line of text in the bottom right-hand corner of your food snap.)

Anyway, here's the original post and recipe, with the toe-curling pictures. I hope they don't put you off making this unusual dish - it's delicious hot or cold, and makes the very best of that most succulent of cuts, pork neck. I have tweaked this recipe a little, the chief changes being shortening the cooking time of the pork and slightly reducing the oven temperature.

At the end of this post you'll find more of my seasonal plum recipes.

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Have you ever tasted a fresh prune? That is, a prune plum before it’s dehydrated and turned into a soft and wrinkly ink-black sac? My local veggie shop is full of these little jewels, which are sweet, with a dense yellow flesh and a slight muskiness. I bought a big box of them, hoping they’d be devoured by the kids, but this variety of plum doesn’t have the eating appeal of the peach-sized, ruby-juice-running-down-your-chin, late-season plums on the market now.

At the same time, I was pondering how to cook yet another lovely pork neck. Remembering that prunes and pork are a wonderful combination, I turned the prune plums into a sharp-sweet relish flavoured with preserved stem ginger, and then I slow-roasted the neck in a spicy oriental glaze. A delicious combination, equally good hot or cold.

You can use pork fillet for this recipe, but you will need significantly to reduce the cooking time because pork fillet will dry out if it's cooked for too long. Similarly, ordinary plums will do for this recipe, although they won’t hold their shape the way muscular prune plums do, so you might want to reduce the amount of liquid and, again, shorten the cooking time.

You will need to make the prune relish an hour or so ahead of roasting the pork.

Glazed Roast Pork Neck with a Gingery Fresh-Prune Relish

For the prune-plum relish:
2 cups (500 ml) prune plums, washed
½ cup (125 ml) dark sugar (muscovado or treacle sugar)
½ cup (125 ml) white-wine vinegar
½ cup (125 ml) water
one 2cm x 2cm piece of preserved stem ginger, finely diced or squashed (I pushed it through my garlic crusher!)
1 Tbsp (15 ml) ginger syrup, from the jar of preserved ginger
1 tsp (5 ml) powdered ginger

For the pork and glaze:
1 whole pork neck, trimmed of excess fat
a little olive oil
½ cup (125 ml) of the cooked prune-plum relish and syrup (see above)
4 Tbsp (60 ml) rice wine vinegar (ordinary white-wine vinegar will do)
2 Tbsp (30 ml) honey
1 Tbsp (15 ml) Kikkoman soy sauce
½ cup (125 ml) mirin (or you can use sweetish white wine)
3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
a thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, finely grated
 freshly milled black pepper

First make the relish. Halve the prunes and remove the stones. Set aside. Put the sugar, vinegar, water, stem ginger, ginger syrup and powdered ginger in a saucepan, set over a medium heat and bring gently to the boil, stirring now and then. Tip in the halved, pitted plums  and simmer uncovered for about 20 minutes, skimming off any foam as it rises. Watch the pan carefully, because a sugary syrup like this burns quickly. When the juice has reduced to about half a cup of thickish syrup, turn off the heat and set the pan aside to cool.

To roast the pork, heat the oven to 200°C. Put the pork neck  in a small roasting tray, brush with a little olive oil and season well with milled black pepper (but no salt). Roast the pork for 30 minutes at 200° C, or until it is beginning to brown at the edges.

In the meantime, make the glaze. Take a half a cup (125 ml) of the plum relish you’ve just made and place it in a food processor or liquidiser, along with all the remaining glaze ingredients. Whizz to a paste (not too fine: a few little flecks of prune are nice). Add more pepper, if necessary, but don’t add any more salt: the soy sauce is salty enough on its own.

Remove the pork neck from the oven and drain off any excess fat by tilting the roasting dish over the sink. Turn the oven down to 170° C. Pour the glaze over the pork, and cover the dish with foil or a tight-fitting lid. Roast the neck for a further 45 minutes, turning it over once during that time.

Now take the foil or lid off the dish, turn the heat up to 190 °C, and roast for another 35-45 minutes, basting frequently, or until the pork is cooked right through and the glaze is dark and glossy. Remove from the oven and allow to rest, lightly covered with a piece of foil, for 20 minutes.

Cut into thin slices and serve with the prune-plum relish.  This is good hot with a slightly bitter green salad and boiled new potatoes.  If you're serving it cold, take it to the table with the relish and some warm, crusty bread.

 Serves 6-8.



More of my Scrumptious plum recipes:

Cheesecake with a Fresh Plum Topping

Fresh plum jelly with a Lemon Panna Cotta Topping

Fresh-Plum and Almond Cake

Spiced Plums with Tamarind

Christmassy Plum and Tamarind Sauce

Festive Phyllo Crackers with a Spicy Plum and Almond Filling

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Oven-Baked Pork, Sage, Cider and Potato Stew

A tender-flavoured winter stew of pork, sage and apple, a well-loved combination that I like to think of as a polygamous marriage (with pork being the boy, of course, and sage and apple the spirited gals*).

Apple is without a doubt the senior wife in this flavour alliance, because few other ingredients have such an affinity with the juicy sweetness of pork. 'On a plate, these two are made for each other,' writes Niki Segnit in her brilliant book The Flavour Thesaurus. 'With a plate of proper roast pork, by which I mean one with a curly roof of crackling, your apple pulls back the curtains and throws open the window of your plate.'

Sage is an interesting but strident herb that works best when used sparingly. (In other words, an aggressive bitch among herbs; delicious in small doses.)

I almost always bake stews in the oven these days because I find that long slow cooking at a steady temperature produces a better result than a pot put over a flame. Oven-baked stews don't catch on the bottom of the pot, and you can neglect them as they gently burble to perfect tenderness. Do stir the stew now and then, though. Or reach into the oven with gloved hands and give the dish a firm shake.

Ask your butcher for the most suitable cut for this dish. I've made it several times using pork neck (and it's faintingly good) but I think, because this is such a mild-flavoured stew, a leaner cut is better suited.

* Please don't admonish me for this. After all, 'pork' is not a suitable name for a woman.

Oven-cooked Pork, Sage, Cider and Potato Stew

4 T (60 ml) oil (mild olive oil or sunflower oil)
2 T (30 ml) butter
4 leeks, white parts only, rinsed and sliced
two stalks of celery, finely sliced
4 large carrots, peeled and cubed
2 bay leaves
a large sprig of fresh sage (about 6 leaves)
an 8-cm sprig of fresh rosemary
3 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
2 kg lean pork (cut from the shoulder or leg), cubed, or in thick strips
3 T (45 ml) flour
2 cups (500 ml) dry cider (such as Strongbow)
2 cups (500 ml) water
½ cup (125 ml) clear apple juice (Liquifruit, or similar)
3 T (45 ml) Dijon mustard
1 tsp (5 ml) finely grated lemon zest
8 large potatoes, peeled and quartered
salt and freshly ground black pepper

To finish:

½ cup (125 ml) cream
the juice of a small lemon
a handful of chopped fresh parsley

Preheat the oven to 170ºC. Heat half (2 tablespoons) of the oil in a large, shallow ovenproof pan or casserole dish. Add the leeks, celery, carrots, bay leaves, sage, rosemary and a pinch of salt. Cook over a medium heat for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until the vegetables have softened slightly. Don't allow the onions to catch or burn. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Remove the vegetables from the pan and set aside.

Put the flour in a deep bowl and season with salt and black pepper. Add the pork and, using your hands, toss well so that every cube or strip is dusted with flour.

Add the remaining oil to the pan and turn up the heat. Brown the pork cubes, in several small batches, for a few minutes, or until they have developed a golden crust. Add more oil, if necessary. Push the browned cubes to one side of the pan while you brown the rest (or set them aside on a plate). If there is a lot of fat in the pan, tip all the cubes into a colander set over a sink and drain off the excess. Now return the vegetables, herb sprigs and set-aside pork to the pot. Mix the cider, water and apple juice in a jug and pour it into the pan, stirring briskly with a spoon or whisk to disperse any lumps. Bring to a gentle boil. Stir in the mustard and lemon zest. Add the peeled potatoes and season with more salt and black pepper, if necessary.

Mix everything together well, cover with a lid or tin foil and place in the oven. Cook for an hour at 170ºC. Open the oven, remove the lid, and give everything a good stir. Turn down the heat to 160ºC and cook for another half hour or so, stirring once or twice, or until the potatoes and meat are very tender, and the gravy has thickened a little. If the gravy seems too thin, put the pan on the hob and allow to bubble gently for ten minutes, or until it has reduced to your liking. Immediately before serving, stir in the lemon juice, cream and chopped parsley. Don't reheat on the stove, as the gravy may curdle. Serve piping hot, with a plain green salad, or some hot buttered peas.

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