Pork Loin Roast with Bramley Apple Sauce

A kilo of loin is too much pork for two people in one sitting, and that's the point. You get a proper roast on Sunday, a second dinner of cold pork with the leftover roasties, and enough left over for sandwiches after that. The only thing that genuinely matters here is the crackling, and crackling is won the night before with salt and a dry fridge - not in the oven.

Ingredients

• 1 kg boneless pork loin — skin on, or you get no crackling
• 1 tbsp flaky salt — for the skin, the night before
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 3–4 sprigs rosemary
• 4 cloves garlic — unpeeled, just bashed
• 2 brown onions — thick rounds, they become the trivet
• 1 swede — peeled, 3 cm chunks
• 1 kg Maris Piper potatoes
• 3 tbsp sunflower oil
• Black pepper

For the gravy

• 1 Knorr stock pot + 400 ml water
• 100 ml red wine — optional, but it's open
• 1 tsp Dijon

To serve

• Bramley apple sauce
• Broccoli or peas

Method

1. The night before. Score the skin in lines about 1 cm apart, cutting through the fat but not into the meat. Rub the flaky salt right into the cuts. Sit it uncovered on a plate in the fridge overnight. This is the whole crackling trick — the fridge pulls moisture out of the skin, and dry skin puffs while wet skin leathers. Don't skip it and then wonder why.

2. Come to room temperature. Take the pork out an hour before it goes in. Pat the skin dry again — there'll be beads of moisture on it. Rub the meat (not the skin) with Dijon and pepper, and tuck rosemary underneath.

3. Blast it. Oven to 240°C. Sit the onion rounds and bashed garlic in a roasting tin and put the pork on top, skin up. No oil on the skin. Roast 25 minutes — the skin should be blistering and starting to lift.

4. Drop and go. Down to 180°C. Add the swede chunks around the meat, tossed in a little oil. Roast a further 50–60 minutes, about 30 minutes per kilo at this stage. It's done at 65°C in the middle, or when the juices run clear.

5. Potatoes, meanwhile. Peel and quarter, boil 8 minutes from cold salted water, drain and shake them hard in the colander until the outsides go fluffy and ragged. Those ragged edges are the crunch. Roast in the remaining oil in a separate tin, 180°C, 45 minutes, turning once.

6. Rest properly. Lift the pork out and leave it 20 minutes somewhere warm, uncovered — foil steams the crackling soft and undoes your overnight work. If the crackling isn't quite there, cut it off in one sheet and give it 10 minutes under a hot grill on its own while the meat rests.

7. Gravy from the tin. Spoon off most of the fat but keep the onions and the browned bits. Set the tin over a low flame, add the wine and scrape everything up, let it bubble for a minute. Add the stock pot and water, simmer 5 minutes, stir in the Dijon, then strain it, pressing the onions through. Squeeze the roast garlic out of its skins into the gravy if you want it richer.

8. Carve and serve. Thick slices, crackling snapped into shards on the side, apple sauce, roasties, swede, and something green.