17
TIPS and SUGGESTIONS
Juices
– we recommend using a jug with the oven to keep the juices that are often discharged during the
cooking process which can be used to make your gravy. The fat can be used to cook your spuds in or
saved for later use. The juice can be used to make the gravy. We make our gravy using approx. 50% juice
20% fat (so pour off the majority of the fat from the jug) Add 30% hot water with a teaspoon of salt per litre.
The gravy is used to ensure the meat is moist (not wet) so when carving the pork into the top trays the
gravy can be added just prior to serving, we keep our gravy hot in a soup heater or a bain-marie or use the
top trays to keep it hot.
Pigs
– Suckling pigs can be tricky as, they are very expensive per kilo and don’t have enough fat on them
to make the meat juicy. We suggest if you are only cooking for say 80 people that you use a full pig with
the shoulders removed (a dressed hind) and keep the shoulders for another occasion (most standard pigs
in the UK are grown to around 55-60kilos, enough to serve around 140-200 people but too large for the
Mini Spit Roast Oven.)
Stuffing
– we use take away tin foil trays to prepare our stuffing, they are approx. 200mm x 100mm and
that size provides a nice servable amount that we can keep hot and place on the serving area or put in the
bain-marie to keep hot. The granule mix can be easily prepared with freshly boiled water and improved
with around 30mins to an hour in the oven. We make it very watery like porridge as after an hour in the
oven it becomes much thicker.
The standard off the shelf mix can be made much nicer by adding cooked onions or other ingredients such
as apricots etc. if want to go the extra mile.
Crackling - this is a science on its own! The basic rule is that the skin needs to be dry in order to get good
crackling, so don’t use a freshly killed pig. Skin can be dried further by rubbing salt into it prior to cooking.
Following the cooking guide already mentioned will help to get the skin to blister and form the ‘foam’ style
crackling. If you cook without the crackling forming then it can make the skin very tough like leather and it
will then never form. One trick is to use a blow torch on the skin to form the crackling instantly
– try doing
this after about 30mins of cooking
it’s quicker than the salt process.
Cleaning - much easier if you put some wide tin foil on the bottom of the oven. Push the edges under the
burners and make sure you put your finger through the foil where the drain hole is and make sure you keep
the juices. When using the oven for the first time we have found that MER (found in automotive accessory
shops) can be applied on the oven to protect it from staining for longer.
