Crispy Pig's Head Easiest and Tastiest Apple sauce

Okay I've been serving half pig head upstairs at Trinity for a long long time, super crispy with crackling at another level. We serve it with a baked apple sauce, we marinate it in spice and orange and we bake it whole. I'm going to show you exactly how we do that right here. Okay firstly these are my half pigs so that's one head split in half. We've got the cheek over here, we've got the ear, we've got the snout meat there and you'll see how it all comes to fruition later on. We are going to first of all give this guy a little bit of a removal of the ears and we use the ears for something completely different. So first of all take off the ears, they get used for another preparation for us. If you leave them on essentially they will burn so we don't want those on there as well. Lose that, there's a label there Sam, look at that label, just in case I didn't actually know what they were. That's very nice of everyone isn't it. Right on there you go, like that, nice and simple. We're going to squeeze some orange juice in there. You got another orange for me Rose? Because I made a mistake, which does happen. Orange, got some lovely spices, fennel, star anise, curry and seeds, black peppercorn all in there. Into that some of this which is grey salt. We use a lot of grey salt, mainly for confit and things like that. This is about drawing out moisture and impurities from the pig head. We just mix that around very simply, orange juice, spices and the grey salt and then we rub that in to the head and that stays in the fridge marinated like so. There's no wasted measures, I just use enough to get it on there and then I put some on the bottom as well and this will, you'll be surprised, this pushes a lot of flavour in to the pig head. Leave that, that goes in the fridge 24 hours and what it does, it draws out all the impurities, it imparts flavour into the pig head and it takes out all the liquids that we don't want as well and it gives it that extra flavour. Also helps with the crackling, very important. So 24 hours in the fridge then I'll show you the next stage. Okay while that pig head's going to marinate for 24 hours, we need to make our sauce. You can make this in advance, it doesn't have to be made then. This is how we make a very simple and different apple sauce. It's not like the one I make with Brambleys. We just take these pink ladies, we put them on a tray with paper and we put them in the oven. That's it. All the sugars from that apple is going to caramelise and melt the apples and roast the apples and then we'll end up with a puree, a very different style of puree which will adjust in the blender afterwards. That's how we do it, let's marinate those pig's heads. Okay that pig's head has had 24 hours of marinade. It then gets a little rinse under cold water, not a lot, just to run it off. Once that's done, we vacuum pack them and we cook them on a steam overnight. Very simply though, you can just wrap them in cling film, then wrap them in tin foil and you can cook them at 120 degrees for 12 hours. Very, very simple. Once that's cooked in an oven for 120 degrees for 12 hours, we can take it out and chill it in the fridge and that's where the stage we're at now. So we've cooked these in cling film to demonstrate that we cook them the same way rather than cooking them in a sous vide bag. You take it out and this is essentially now cooked pig's head. There is another, the other half is over there. Essentially you now take off all this cling film or the bag you cooked it in and this is the stage I would get to for service you see. That goes away or the jelly goes away. That's that pig's head. This is cooked now, this is actually cooked. You could eat this like this but we want this to be super crispy. If you see that it's sticky and tacky and that's really good. Nice bit of oil, very good olive oil of course. Rub that in nicely. This gives us a bit of protection and stops the meat from burning and allows it to sort of crisp up really nicely. You're adding any moisture that's going to come out of that pig's head now is going to spit out with the oil. I'm going to add a bit more salt now as well because I want that sort of nice rich crispy feeling with the oil. That's now going to at 190 degrees and it will take about 45 minutes to cook. So 190, straight in, full fan, get it in and it will come up super crispy now and that's how we do it. There we go, look at that. That is a crispy pig's head. 180, 45 minutes crispy pig's head. So how do we get to that point? Let's recap on that. We did a lovely salting process overnight to draw out any moisture, orange juice, lovely spices on there and then we rinsed that off, we wrapped it in cling film, we wrapped it in tin foil and then we went 120 for 12 hours overnight. Then we took it out, we chilled that in the fridge. Next day onto a cooling rack, 180 degree, preheated oven and it went 45 minutes. That's it, it's easy and look at this guy. That's what all those influencers do, isn't it? Of course it's cracking, I mean come on. So I've rested that now for about half an hour, that's why I can handle it. It's still crispy. That could go as a centrepiece on the table. You'll win lots of friends, not the vegetarian ones, but you'll win lots of friends with that and then we've got our apple sauce. Remember that beautiful apple sauce we're going to make? So that there is those apples. Remember apples on paper in the oven, that's it. What's going to happen now is we're going to make a very different, interesting little apple sauce. All I'm going to do is take, this is the easiest apple sauce I've ever made. I like this a lot, it's really cool. We do make this in a blender, but I'm going to make it without just to kind of make it as user-friendly as possible. So there's the apples, look how smashed up and soft they are. All I've done is put them in the oven. You saw me put them in the oven and take them out of the oven. I'm going to put them through a sieve, that's a conical sieve because I want to kind of get rid of all of that skin. Oh hello, it's a nice ladle and I just want the puree to go through and it's that puree we're then going to turn into a lovely sauce. This is the perfect accompaniment to this apple sauce. If you wanted to you could just chuck this into a blender and it does work, it makes a lovely thing in a blender, but I kind of wanted to, you know, when you use, when I show you all the blender stuff, you kind of get a bit bored of it and I don't blame you because it is agro being at home, taking everything out of a blender, you know, whereas you could actually just put it through a sieve like this. There we go, so it's not a fine sieve, just any sieve you got. You could just chuck that in a blender but equally put through a nice sieve like that. We've got a lovely roasted apple, see that colour in there, it's almost like a sort of a roasted apple puree. I'm going to add a little bit of my good olive oil in there. I'm going to add a little pinch of sugar in there. I'm going to add a little bit of sherry vinegar in there, almost 50-50 sugar and vinegar just for that touch. A little bit of salt as well into there and I'm going to add a tiny bit of Dijon mustard because I like it and I like it especially with pig's head. Right so recap, Dijon mustard, sugar, vinegar, olive oil and all that apple and then you just want to emulsify that together and the Dijon mustard will help with that as well. It's very different, it's more roasted, more acidic, sharper, more like a condiment than it is that sort of sweet apple sauce that you're used to. A little taste of that, yum yum. Right let's carve this lovely pig's head. So to tackle this pig's head there's basically portions like this. So first of all straight through, you need to use a serrated knife, doesn't have to have a pink handle, that's just my preference, not really. We need a serrated knife to get that nice finish and you carve all the way down until you can't go any further and you lift it off, trim that away and that's what you end up with. By the way once you've carved all this you can chill it in the fridge, this is what we do, chill the whole thing in the fridge. Next day pick off all the meat and the skin and the crackling and then you simply turn that into a lovely croqueta. It is utterly delicious or fold it through a paella or fold it through a risotto or have it as cold cuts. There's so many things you can do with it. Look at that, that fat looks like a lot of fat but I'm telling you that is utterly delicious. This pig's head was supplied to me by my friend at Moen's the Butchers. I pay for it so you know I'm just shouting him out because it's nice. That's a really nice pig's head. That there is the cheek so we want that, that's really important. You want the cheek out of there and then there's another really important piece of meat as well which is up here which is called the temple and we can lift that out. This might be getting too much Sam but it is what it is. There and then there's another piece on the snout as well, all the way down, all the way through. You'll see under here there's a lovely piece of meat you can lift out. Come on you, that's seriously good meat that. So out comes the pig's head. It's so much flavour in this thing. Lift that off there, that's your lovely crackling and then you've got another cheek on the other side of the cheek as well. So underneath that cheek there's another piece of meat as well which you can pull out. Because it's been cooked overnight for 12 hours you've got lovely soft meat underneath there as well. You know and for the price of something like a pig's head the yield is actually really fantastic. Let's plate one of these up with the lovely apple sauce and see what he thinks.