How To Make Stuffed Pork Chops

So, I'm going to make a stuffing which consists of pork mince, about 150 grams and half a chopped onion which is being softened in butter out on a low heat in a little bit of butter, 30 grams of chopped figs, 25 grams of pistachio nuts that should be roughly chopped, and about 3 or 4 sage leaves which should be finely chopped. So, the stuffing ingredients, just wait for the onion to cool down completely before you mix it with the pork mince otherwise it can cause some bacterial growth, so that's quite important. So you've cooked your onions until they're really nice and soft and squishy, left them to cool completely and then add them to your mince.

You could use sausage meat if you prefer and then just bang everything else in, lots of salt and pepper and instead of the figs, if you wanted to use apricots instead, that would be great. They go really well with pistachio nuts and with pork. A good sprinkling of salt, and mix all that up together.

It's probably easiest to do this with your hands, actually. So, that's the stuffing mixed all together and now, I'm going to deal with the joint of meat. This is a loin of pork, but it's still on a bone, so it's a little bit like a rack of lamb and it's got really good skin on it here which we can try and get some good crackling out of when it's in the oven.

Use a really good sharp knife just to cut through the skin just into the fat, but try not to cut too far down into the meat. And then, if you can, go the other way just so get the diamond pattern. So, now, I've got some really good diamonds on there.

Take a little bit of sunflower oil and just rub that all over the skin and make sure it goes into the cuts that you've made. Then, the secret to really good crackling is getting a lot of salt on the skin and making sure you get it really well rubbed into those cuts and that will help draw out some of that fat from underneath the skin and make it really nice and crispy. Okay, so that's the skin.

Then, this has come from our little butcher, so it might be different if you're buying it from a supermarket, but this bone here is called the chine bone and if you're at the butcher, you want to ask him to chine the bone, which means to saw through this part of the bone here. And then we're going to try and take this bottom bone off so that we can then make a slit in the meat to stuff the pork chops. So just get a small knife in and use a kind of striking action to cut that bone off.

Just check that you haven't gotten any bits of shoulder blade or bits of the central nervous system which can lurk around this part here. Then we're going to make a cut in the middle of the meat, halfway down as a little area to stuff the pork. Take your stuffing and stuff into that part there.

Get as much as you can in. Then, with a little bit of string, just slip the string underneath and tie it up. Then turn it skin-side up on a roasting tin and we're going to roast it at 200 degrees centigrade or gas mark 6 for about 45 minutes to an hour, and then we'll see how well-crackled the skin is and how cooked the meat is inside.

I've just taken the pork out after about an hour and use a skewer to put in the centre of the meat to see how hot it is. It should be that pork is quite hot. Test on the back of your wrist, and that's boiling hot, so that's cooked inside.

And also, the crackling has crackled really well on top of this as well. And it's a good idea to let the pork rest for about 5-10 minutes or any meat that's cooked so that all the juices inside the meat have a chance to settle back through the meat. Cut off the string, take the crackling off the top first and then we'll carve the meat.

So, to take the crackling off, just take the knife and slide it underneath the crackling. Just carve down in between the bones at the back. Cut the crackling up a little bit, and that's how to make stuffed pork chops.

The pork chop goes very well with onion gravy or just the juices from