Pork Cooked in Milk with Bay Leaf and Cinnamon

This recipe basically involves browning a pork roast in a pot, adding milk and flavourings, and then simmering with the lid half off until the pork is cooked and still juicy, and the milk has evaporated leaving the remaining solids to caramelize into an almost cheesy sauce.

I only had a small roast (about 500 grams) and, even though I tried to scale the recipe down, it took only 50 minutes to cook the pork and over 2 hours to evaporate the milk. This may have been a result of cooking the roast in a smaller pan, although I figured this was just part of scaling down the recipe.

The result was tender and flavourful pork. The caramelized sauce is slightly sweet and subtly flavoured with bay and cinnamon. If you didn't know what it was, it would be hard to describe.

This was very, very delicious - but I really wouldn't serve it to guests again, it just looked too much like a dish gone wrong! We cooked the milk until it looked like grains.

This recipe was a lot simpler than the one we made a few weeks ago - and a lot clearer in the instructions as well!

On the downside, it also contains the risk that the meat will be done long before the sauce is ready and might even end up a little dry. Like Barbara, we took out the meat at a certain point to continue to reduce the sauce; unfortunately, though, the meat had already become a very little dry in the less fatty places. I think that the meat might also be prone to drying out because the dish isn't closed off hermetically which means that the meat that sticks out of the sauce tends to be colder, and therefore doesn't reach the temperature at which collagen begins to melt (read All About Braising to find out more). I wonder whether it would make sense to take out half of the milk after about half the braising time and reduce that while the pork continues to cook fully covered.