Pork knuckle baked in different ways

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

Baked knuckle is a favorite Czech dish. It's called the knee. But in Russian cuisine, they like to cook pork leg. It looks good on the festive table as a main dish, but it is also suitable for everyday life, since the secret of its preparation is simple. True, long. Because before baking, the meat must be marinated for a day or at least a night.

Each housewife has her own recipe for this dish: knuckle baked in the oven in a “naked” form, in foil or in a culinary sleeve. Someone boils the meat before placing it in the oven, and someone is an ardent supporter of simple pickling. By the way, there are about fifteen marinades for pork shank: in beer, kvass, soy sauce with honey, etc. But the general process of preparing the dish is the same. We act in this algorithm: wash the meat thoroughly, dry it, stuff it with garlic (or garlic and prunes), put it in the marinade. After some time, we take out and bake in the oven, preheated to 200 C, for about an hour. We try readiness with a fork with longwith teeth or a wooden stick: colorless juice should come out of an easily pierced product, not blood.

It seems to be simple, but there are still a lot of secrets that you should know so that the baked pork knuckle comes out soft, tender, but also with a ruddy, fried skin.

First, marinade. If you do not have time to wait a whole day and you want to bake meat in two to three hours, use s alt to coat. Mix it with equal parts black pepper, rosemary, turmeric, oregano, add mustard (optional, or soy sauce) to this powder and coat the knee on all sides. But before that, stuff with garlic. To do this, use a knife with a narrow tip. Make shallow cuts on the pork and push a quarter or half of a garlic clove into the resulting holes. Garlic-stuffed meat is ready to bake in just a few hours.

If you decide to cook pork the next morning, you do not need to s alt the marinade. A knuckle baked with whole skin will turn out fatter. In this case, you don’t need to stuff it, but simply put a head of garlic next to it when baking, or chop the garlic into a marinade (or rub the meat with garlic mashed with vegetable oil). If you want to get a more dietary product, before sending the knee to the oven, you should make cross cuts on the skin so that excess fat drains - pork is fried a little faster in this case.

Pork knuckle baked in foil orsleeve, does not require regular turning, but then her skin will be pale and ugly. 20 minutes before readiness, you need to get the meat out of the “clothes” and bake already in the “naked form” so that an appetizing tan and even a crispy crust form. If you know your oven is so weak that it overcooks food from the bottom, place the pork on a pillow of onion halves or thick slices of chopped potatoes.

And, finally, an economy option: pea soup and knuckle baked from one piece of meat. Boil the pork in uns alted water with the onion in the husk until fully cooked, removing the foam. We use the broth as a base for soup, and dry the shank with a paper towel, stuff with garlic, rub with s alt and put in a mixture of soy sauce (1-2 cups), liquid honey (several tablespoons), juice of 1 lemon and pepper sauce. Boiled meat is marinated quickly, half an hour is enough. It should also be baked for a short time - 15-20 minutes, until a golden crust forms.