Cooking Pork Collar at Home

Pork collar is often a lesser-used cut of pork but it's truly a wonderful one to cook.

On this week's blog, our Executive Chef Fran Martinez has put together a fabulous pork collar recipe you might want to try at home, Fazendeiros.

Pork Collar Stuffed with Mushrooms & Cheese

For this recipe, I wanted to use a very humble and cheap cut. I went to a butchers and asked for a whole pork collar (approx. 2Kg), which will easily serve up to six people.

We're going to be filling this collar with autumn flavours, using mushroom as the main ingredient and adding in a savoury cheese and sweet onion among other ingredients, to bring out the different layers of flavour with each bite.

This recipe is very easy, and can be prepared the day before.

Ingredients (Serves 6)

Pork collar (approx. 2Kg)

Goat's or feta cheese - 200g

Mushrooms - 500g

Caramelised onion - 50g

Rosemary - 1 sprig

Garlic - 3 cloves

Black pepper - 1 Tbsp

Salt - 1 Tbsp

Preparation

First, we need to prepare the meat so that we can stuff it with our other ingredients. To do this, place the pork collar on a clean chopping board and cut a slit into the side. This slit can then be followed up to the other side of the collar in order to butterfly the meat.

Your local butcher should be able to help you with this, if you're uncertain.

Next, we're going to create the stuffing. Roughly chop the cheese, mushrooms, caramelised onion, rosemary and garlic and mix these with the black pepper and salt in a bowl. Spread open your pork collar, put stuffing in the middle and roll everything up.

Once the stuffing is created, we can then open our cut of meat out on a chopping board and lay our stuffing across the centre. The meat then needs to be rolled up, ensuring it is kept tight so the stuffing does not fall out.

For this particular recipe I've chosen potatoes and pickled onions for my trimmings, as they will cook with the fat drippings during the slow-cooking process, making them extra flavourful. Place your rolled up pork collar on top of the trimmings ready to be cooked.

Cooking

To start, we need to pre-heat the oven to 160°C. We'll cook the meat at this temperature for an hour, and then we will increase the temperature to 220°C and cook at this temperature for 20 minutes, making sure to keep an eye of the crispiness on the outside of the meat.

When I serve this dish, I bring the whole roast to the dining table to showcase it to my guests, and I can then slice it for them and serve with trimmings. Enjoy!

You can see a quick video of Fran putting this all together here.

We hope you try - and love - this recipe. As always we would love it if you shared your creations with us and particularly Fran, Fazendeiros. And if you have any questions for him, post them in the comments below!

You can view more of Fran's amazing recipes here.