We are back: Hello from Canberra & Pork Knuckles

Hello Foodies,

I know we haven’t said this ‘hello’ for a long while. Indeed, it has been two years since my last post on the Wine for Yoga Lovers.

You may have wondered where we have been and what happened to us in the past two years. Well, put it simple, I changed job and relocated from Adelaide to Canberra. Yes, you are right – this post is written in my home in Canberra and it is a ‘hello from Canberra’.

Settling into a new job, let along a new city, is a challenge but fortunately I have a very good supervisor to support me during this process. Workload was definitely high during the time so blogging has been put down the bottom of the list. Not that I don’t care about my dear reader friends, you, I just didn’t have time to juggle between life and work to keep the ball rolling.

Now with a breathing time ahead, I am finally able to get back onto blogging and write you my experience in the ACT and NSW. I feel lucky that I was raised in South Australia with so many world-acclaimed food produce around me. That is home.

I hope all my readers are coping ok with the COVID-19 pandemic. During this unprecedented time, we need to be together and stronger. Look after your mental health as well as your physical health. Let’s think about the positives, the food and have a laugh together.

Announcements

The name of the blog has changed. The blog is now formally rebranded ‘Foodies Cucina’ meaning foodies kitchen to make it a more national blog so in future when I move around, I don’t have to change link title. Adelaidefoodies.com registration has expired due to our inactivity during the past two years so please bookmark www.foodiescucina.com instead.

The content of the blog will change slightly. Instead me writing food all the time (and I am sure you will be bored after my 12 years of writing), I will also share our travel experience, do wine review and share my gardening tips/ideas.

Now, let’s get into today’s post – supermarket food.

Port Knuckle – Coles and Woolies: Which is my favourite?

You probably want to ask me – why are you writing supermarket food? Yes, this is very valid question. Throughout the past 12 years, I have written all the fine food, fine produce, fine restaurants and hard-to-find ingredients. The more I wrote about those, the more I felt that I was away from our daily life so for this ‘brand new’ post, I decided to write about supermarket food – Pork Knuckle.

You probably noted increased presence of pork knuckle products in supermarket chains in recent years. Coles, Woolworths, Costco, IGA and Aldi all have them. I can even find the cooked product in the Fyshwick Fresh Food Market in Canberra. By the way, I miss Foodland in SA – truly a hidden treasure there.

Many of my friends asked me how these pork knuckles taste to me. I never tried them previously as there are restaurants, especially German, all over the place and at the Oktoberfest time. However, because thinking about this post, I digged into the ones sold in Coles and Wollies.

On the first look after taking the package off, the one on the left is from Coles whereas the one on the right is from Woolies. The Coles one is slightly smaller although it is heavier than the other one. Probably the size of the bones made the differences.

Both products had a good load of juice jelly from the pork.

Cooking the products is relatively simple.

Rub the skin of the knuckles with the pork fat from the package (Coles) or with a good load of olive oil.
Punch sufficient number of holes using a fork on the skin of the knuckles and rub cooking salt (or salt flakes) all over the knuckles.
Into the oven at 200^oC roast for 45 mins and 250^oC grill for 15 mins until the crackling appears.
Take them out of the oven and rest for 5 mins before cutting and serving.

Coles Pork Knuckle – Super tasty. This is what I call a traditional pork knuckle with crispy crackling on the outside and the slow cooked pork meat on the inside. Knocking on the crispy skin, one could feel the don don sound showing cooked well through. The meat and the skins were melt in the mouth with a good fragrance of quality herbs. The meat was soft and fallen off the bone easily. The bones were very small with loads of bone marrows. My rating: 15/20.

Woolworths Pork Knuckle – Woolies pork knuckle claimed it was the Bavarian style knuckle. Okay I could accept that but it tasted very different from the ones I had in quality restaurants. The meat tasted like smoked pork hock or to be precise, bacon. The meat was the smoky pinkish color while the skin was also pink. The skin crackling was as good as the Coles one but the meat was quite attached to the bone. If you like bacon flavoured meat, you may find yourself liking this product but it is not my type unfortunately. My rating: 13/20.

Both of the products are sufficient for more than two people as Tina and I had not been able to finish any single one of them. Price-wise, they are both selling at around $13 per kilo at RRP.

So foodies, do you have a favourite type pork knuckle, readily available in the market? If you, I’d been keen to hear from you to do more taste test. Please drop me a line in the comments below. 🙂

Until next post, have a great time …..

James