Crown Roast of Pork with Apple Stuffing (Page 474)

RECIPE #903

• Date: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 -- 6:30pm
• Location: Madison, WI
• Kitchen: My Mom's Apartment
• Dining Companions: Matty, Terry, Teri, Spencer, and Ellen
• Recipe Rating: B
  

My mother had never had crown roast of pork before so of the options I presented her, she chose this recipe for our family Christmas dinner. The recipe called for a 9-11 pound crown roast of pork, and when I called the butcher to order it, I didn't even think about how huge that might be. When I got to the butcher though, and saw what a ginormous piece of meat it was, I suddenly thought maybe I had read the recipe wrong. I stood there thinking, "Maybe I was meant to have ordered 9 - 11 ribs, not 9 - 11 pounds." I knew that the recipe was supposed to serve 8 - 10 people, rather than just the 6 people I was making it for, but still -- it seemed impossible to me that even 10 people could east a roast that big. I deliberated about what to do and finally I called Chris, from the butcher, to check the recipe in his copy of The Book. It was right though -- the 10 pound crown roast the butcher had prepared for me was just what the recipe called for. Wow was it huge!

To prepare the crown roast I started by making an apple stuffing. I first dried out some bread squares in the oven. Then I cooked onion and celery in butter, and added sliced Granny Smith apples, sugar, salt, pepper, sage, thyme, nutmeg, and cinnamon. I cooked it until the apples were tender then added the bread squares, parsley, and chives. I then seasoned the crown roast with salt and pepper and spooned the stuffing inside. I wrapped the tips of the bones in foil, then wrapped the outside of the roast in strips of bacon. I roasted this (now even heavier!) piece of meat in a roasting pan, covering the stuffing with foil after the first 30 minutes. Once the meat had reached 150 degrees, I let it rest while I made a pan sauce, deglazing with water then adding red currant jelly, salt, and pepper.



So, after all that, how was it? It was pretty good. The meat cooked a lot faster than I thought it would. The Book said it would take between 2 hours 15 minutes and 2 hours 45 minutes to reach an internal temperature of 150 degrees, but my roast was at 150 a little after 2 hours. That, plus a little family miscommunication caused a small dinner snafu. At the time dinner was ready my brother and his girlfriend were still at the movies. So this meat rested longer than it should have, which most likely led to my only complaint about the meat: it was a little dry (from over-resting, and hence reaching too high of an internal temperature). I think if it had only rested 15 minutes, as the recipe indicated, it would have been perfectly cooked, so I am certainly not holding that dryness against the recipe. My real issues with this recipe were with the accompaniments: the stuffing, the sauce, and the glazed apples (see post below). I'm just not a huge fan of stuffing in general -- soggy bread isn't my thing. This stuffing was fine, but I thought the apples in the stuffing, along with the glazed apples as a side was just apple overkill. I like apples as much as the next girl, but all those apples made the dish really sweet. The pan sauce tasted good, but it was incredibly thin (you can see in the picture above how it was hardly coating my meat). A thicker consistency would have been nice. Those are minor complaints though about a dish that was perfectly ok. I wouldn't make this one again, but I enjoyed eating it, and it was a festive dish for a Christmas meal.

Here is the recipe.