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Provisions with Passion Boss Hog He’s renowned for his Fantastic Sausages, now Dennis Spurr brings you a hog in a box, complete with best-ever crackling W 20 hen ex-Smithfield Market butcher Dennis Spurr moved from London to Weymouth, he focused on sausages. Fantastic sausages, admittedly, packed with everything from Moroccan spices to lemongrass, and even local cheddar, but when catering for parties, he wants a great big hunk of meat and he wants to enjoy himself. Indeed, that’s how the owner of the Fantastic Sausage Factory came up with his Hog in a Box concept. Dennis told us how it all began. “I do weddings and occasions, and a few years ago I was doing a lot of parties, and I get fed up that I couldn’t have fun myself – I spent half my time worrying about everyone else and what they were going to eat. So I came up with this do-it-yourself hog roast on a much smaller scale.” Now, you don’t actually get a hog in a box – “I just thought it was a catchy name,” admits Dennis – but you do get perfectly cooked pork loin and leg that falls apart. But if it’s not quite the whole hog, complete with crispy ears, it is much more than a meat feast. As well as the pulled pork, which is cooked low and slow for 18 hours, it comes with everything you’d expect from a Sunday roast, including roast potatoes, apple sauce and stuffing made with sage, onion and meat stock, so it’s “just like Mum used to make it.” Another thing that uses the juice from the meat to bring more matriarchal magic to the occasion is those potatoes., although they also feature an extra secret – “I put a little something on top of them to give them the Dennis touch.” What that is, however, is not being divulged. Of course, the centrepiece is always the meat, and while you’re not getting the complete pig, according to Dennis, you are getting the best bits: “I used to use shoulder – we used to cook whole pigs actually, but now I use leg and loin and it doesn’t slice, it just totally falls apart. You can get some fat and gristle in a shoulder, but the leg and the loin have superb eating quality.” While it is leaner than a pork belly, there still is a bit of fat running through a loin, which will help bring flavour, but the point is that there’s no excessive fat. “People want things to be lean these days,” suggests Dennis. “They don’t want gristly bits in there.” One hunk of fat that people do want with roast pork, however, is the skin, which crisps up in the oven to give us crackling, and Dennis says that his is “the best you’ll ever get”. What’s the secret? Well, it is very difficult to get perfect pork and crispy crackling at the same time as they demand different cooking techniques – to get tender meat that falls apart, you need to cook it low and slow, while the skin needs blasting in a very hot oven to ensure that it’s not chewy. So, Dennis cooks them separately, finishing the crackling off at a very high temperature. The results are wonderful – expertly cooked pork from a “pork cooking expert”. The reception has been brilliant, too, and considering the hog in a box can feed up to 300 people, he is sending a lot of people home happy. 21 The Fantastic Sausage Factory 37, St Mary Street,Weymouth,Dorset,DT4 8PU 01305 766 212 [email protected] www.thefantasticsausagefactory.co.uk/PigginPerfectHogRoasts www.menu-dorset.co.uk www.menu-dorset.co.uk