Slow Cooker Pork Leg in Apple Juice
This slow cooker pork leg is cooked in apple juice, making it beautifully sweet with a yummy sauce.
Do you have a roast on a Sunday? Or even some Sundays? At least for a stretch, we had roast chicken every Sunday when I was growing up. It was a lovely tradition, and the smell of the house was just amazing. My Granny made a legendary roast – I was always squashed in between the table and the wall, the table before me covered with food.
My life now is quite different, and we struggle to squeeze enough into weekends, with days out, laundry, shopping, church, the list is endless. Our weekends aren’t manic and stressful – but the idea of taking half a day to prepare a meal is unimaginable.
Sometimes the lure of the roast is hard to resist though. This weekend we treated ourselves to a prime cut – pork leg no less – and in keeping with our busy weekends, cooked it in the slow cooker. This slow cooker pork leg is not a mushy casserole or stew, but a beautifully tender, sweet joint that practically makes its own apple sauce.
A Slow Cooker Roast
This dish cooks in the slow cooker, then you can thicken the juices and finish off the joint in the oven – and for just a few minutes’ work you have a smart dish you can serve at a dinner party. It doesn’t feel like a mushy slow cooker stew, but the meat is sweet and meltingly tender – all the flavour of the slow cooker.
If you cook a large joint for 7 hours it will produce better slices – a smaller one for 10 hours would be more crumbly. When the joint in our online shop was larger than I expected (over 2kg) I cooked it for just 7 hours in the slow cooker, but gave it a boost by doing the first half hour on high.
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This slow cooker pork leg is cooked in apple juice, making it beautifully sweet with a yummy sauce.
- 2 carrots
- 2 parsnips
- 4 baking (large) potatoes
- 1 onion
- 1 cooking apple
- 1-2 kg pork leg joint nearly 3lb
- 800 ml apple juice 3 1/2 cups
- 2 tbsp cornflour
Peel and dice the carrots, parsnips, apples, potatoes and onion. Place around half in the bottom of the slow cooker, making a well in the middle, and reserve the other half.
Place the joint in the well, and arrange the remaining vegetables and apples around it.
Pour the apple juice in, place the lid on and cook for at least 7 hours on low.
Place the joint in the oven on gas mark 8 to dry it out and give it some colour. After 15 minutes mine was coloured but not crisp on top - I didn't try it for any longer as the toddler needed feeding.
While the joint is in the oven, set the vegetables to one side on a serving dish, carefully reserving the liquid.
Place the liquid in a pan and bring to the boil. Mix the cornflour to a paste with a little water and stir it in to make your sauce.
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