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My first attempt at replicating the Coles Christmas Magazine recipes turned out ok, and would be a great start to the day. For my next culinary adventure, I’ve moved on to something a little more substantial and would do just nicely as a main meal.

Roast pork with rocket, pine nut & fetta stuffing

• SERVES 8 • PREPARATION 10 MINS • COOKING 2 HRS
1 ½ cups fresh white breadcrumbs
1 pkt rocket, trimmed, chopped
50g Ducks Toasted Pine Nuts*
180g South Cape Persian Fetta*, drained,
oil and garlic reserved
1 egg, lightly beaten
2kg Fresh Coles Butcher Rolled Pork Loin Roast
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp salt

Step 1 – Preheat oven to 230°C or 210°C fan.
Step 2 – Combine breadcrumbs, rocket and pine nuts in a large bowl. Chop the reserved garlic from the jar of fetta. Add to breadcrumbs with fetta, reserved fetta oil and egg. Mix well.
Step 3 – Remove pork from netting and lay flat on a clean board, skin side up. Using a sharp knife, score skin. Turn pork over and pound to flatten slightly. Arrange stuffing over middle of pork. Fold pork over stuffing. Tie up roast with kitchen string to enclose stuffing.
Step 4 – Drizzle with oil and rub in salt all over skin. Place on a rack in a baking pan. Bake for 30 mins. Reduce heat to 200°C or 180°C fan. Bake for another 1 hr-1 hr 30 mins, until cooked through. Cover loosely with foil and rest for 15 mins before slicing. Serve with Apple & Fig Compote.

This recipe is from page 11 of this Coles Christmas Mag.

Roasting pork always sets a rewarding challenge in the crackling. Get it wrong and the rubbery mess before you is a waste. Get it right, and you’ve got something that the family will fight over. That happens in our house, as my younger brother has the crackling process down to perfection. He however would not be cooking this one for us.

To start this one off, we have to combine the filling ingredients. This would be by far the easiest step of the day – drop them all into a bowl, mix them up, take a bow. That’s good, because it does it harder from here on in.

The next step is to start preparing the pork. Scoring the skin is where again you’ll appreciate those good knives from a previous post. Flattening out the pork is also a good bit of fun and stress relief.

Once you’ve got the filling sorted out, it’s time to tie the whole thing up (not as easy as it looks) and get into that crackling. Salt and oil and lots of it. It’s not the way my brother does it, but I’m committed to following the recipe on this one.

Then we’re ready for the oven. The pork looks like this…

Before

And then after about 2 hours it looks like this…

After

If you have a look at the magazine version, I’d say we are pretty close again. I’m calling it another win on the appearance side of things.

The crackling was just fine, and the pork was cooked to perfection. It was the best roast pork we’ve done in our house, but still behind the efforts of my sibling.

I was surprised a little with the filling, it was subtle enough to compliment the pork very well…which is probably what the guys that do these recipes for the magazine were thinking of in the first place. I’m not a fan of pine nuts, so we went light on them and that suited us. And by us, I mean me.

What I did not do however was serve with apple and fig compote as suggested, but that was only because I forgot to order those ingredients. If you have a try yourself, let me know what you think about the pork and the compote in the comments section below.