Maiale in Latte

The holidays are over and I'm back in the kitchen. We wanted a hearty homestyle meal after all the restaurants and seafood. I decided to try one recipe from one of my Italian cook books. It's called pork in milk (Maiale in latte) and we liked it, even though it's more like a winter meal...

Ingredients:

1.5 kg whole piece of pork chops with bones (I couldn't find a whole piece so I used 2 smaller pieces)

1 litre of whole milk

4-6 cloves of garlic (I prefer Czech garlic to Chinese, it's got much more flavour)

1-2 rosemary stems (sage should be added as well, but I didn't have any)

juice of one lemon

zest of one lemon

some olive oil

Instructions:

Heat up oven to 200C.

Preferably use a cast iron pan or skillet with a lid, or at least a heavy one made of other metal (I hate thin walled cook ware). Heat up some olive oil and sear the meat until it has a brown crust. Remove some of the fat and put the halved garlic cloves and rosemary on the bottom of the pan, put the meat on top.

Pour the milk over meat and season with salt and freshly ground pepper.

Bring to boil, remove from fire and add lemon juice and zest, stir, cover and put into the heated oven. Bake covered for half an hour, uncover and cook another hour until the liquid reduces to form a sauce. I also added some rosemary infused olive oil, but I don't think it actually made a difference.

Milk and lemon sound weird together because milk products naturally clot when mixed with acid. This sauce is supposed to clot. You can reduce the clotting effect by adding the lemon much later or even just before serving, but the taste will not be the same in my opinion. You might also strain the sauce through a strainer.

I served the meat with pommes fondantes, which are coming up in the next recipe.