Recipe: Sticky Pork with Dandelion & Burdock

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Manchester Gin, I had a little fun cooking over the weekend with the gin and also with an accompanying syrup. You can’t beat a bit of recipe development.

Long term readers may recall that way back when, I went foraging with Caorunn Gin in the depths of Lancashire. The foraging was done with David Winnard of Discover the Wild.

Now almost two years later, David has expanded his business to not only include the classes and events he did before, teaching people like you and I how to forage and what to look for, but he now has his own rage of foraged syrups, featuring locally foraged botanicals.

These are not only proving popular with people like you and I, but also with the bartenders of the city – after all what would go better with a gin like Manchester Gin that has dandelion and burdock root in it, than dandelion and burdock syrup?

Having had both Manchester Gin and a number of the syrups to play with, it was after collecting a beautiful piece of belly pork from Oakbank Farm, via South Manchester Food Assembly that I had a little bit of an idea.

And so my sticky pork recipe was born.

It’s proved a bit of a hit with Mr GFB, so much so that there were zero objections when I made it again to allow me to tweak a couple of elements. I hope you enjoy it too.

Print

Sticky Pork with Dandelion & Burdock

A delicious sticky pork recipe that mostly involves shoving it in the oven and leaving it!

Prep Time 4 hours

Cook Time 2 hours 20 minutes

Total Time 6 hours 20 minutes

Servings 2

Author Charlie H-S

Ingredients

• I piece of pork belly around 450g in weight
• 2 tsp ground coriander
• 50 ml Manchester Gin other gins will work just as well, or vodka or bourbon if you prefer
• 1 tbsp grated ginger
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 2 tbsp Dandelion & Burdock Syrup.

Instructions

1. Put all the ingredients except the syrup into an airtight bag or container.
2. Marinade the pork for at least 4 hours, if not overnight. Give it a little shimmy, or move it around in the bag as and when possible.
3. When ready to cook, preheat to Gas Mark 3/170°C.
4. Take the pork out of the bag/tub and put it in an oven dish.
5. Strain the ginger out of the marinade and put the marinade into the dish too.
6. Cover the dish with foil and put it into the oven for two hours.
7. Grab a G&T or two while you wait.
8. After the two hours, remove the pork from the dish, strain the remains of the marinade and the pork juiced into a pan and put it on the hob.
9. Turn the oven up to Gas Mark 8/230°C.
10. Add the syrup, and bring up to a boil.
11. Simmer until it has reduced to a thick sticky syrup. Turn off.
12. Put the pork back in the dish and put it into the hot oven.
13. After 10 minutes, remove the pork and paint it with the syrup.
14. Return it to the oven.
15. After the final 10 minutes, remove the pork, pour over any of the remaining syrup and leave it to get sticky.
16. Serve with fried rice, or baked potato and salad.

Recipe Notes

If you can't get a whole piece of belly pork, you can use slices instead. However, you need to reduce the initial cooking time by half - so only put it in for half an hour.