Pork Terrine

Pork Terrine

This pork terrine goes well with salad. It can be made ahead of time, at least a day before you are planning to serve it. It can be served as an appetizer or as a main course, depends on what you serve with it. I think potatoes would go well with this as well.

It is my first time trying to make terrine and without any recipe to follow. I just imagined how things would go and with what consistency I was looking for and it worked just right and I'm so pleased with it, especially when you slice and it reveals the black olives and tiny green leaves of thyme. In fact I’m going to explore some more flavors with terrine. Some interesting ideas came up during dinner; hubby suggested fish terrine but use smoked salmon instead of bacon. Hmmm… quite a challenge to figure out how it would work out.

Ingredients:

500 g. minced pork

1 large onion (finely chopped)

4 cloves garlic

Salt and pepper

100 g. black pitted olives

1 Tbsp. Corn starch

1 Tbsp. flour

fresh thyme

300 g. bacon

Procedure:

Preheat oven at 250 degrees C. or gas mark 6.

In a mixing bowl, mix pork, onion and garlic, season with salt and pepper. Using a food processor or blender, blend the mixture until fine. Remove from the blender and add flour and cornstarch. Lastly, add fresh thyme Mix thoroughly by hand. You may want to use gloves as it will be messy.

Line a loaf pan with foil with 3 inch extra on the sides to overlay. Arrange the bacon on top of the foil leaving the ends overhanging the tray.

Put the meat mixture in the lined tray using a spoon. Randomly put the pitted black olives with the sides lying down. Push the mixture with the back of the spoon to make it compact.

Fold inside the remaining bacon that is exposed to cover the meat. Make sure the meat mixture is fully covered with bacon; add extra bacon if necessary

Fold the foil inside to cover the bacon.

Place the pan in a large roasting pan and add boiling water until it reaches half of the loaf pan.

Bake for 1 hour and 30 minutes at 250 degrees C.

Remove the pan and drain extra fat from the bacon by tilting the loaf pan to the sink, but do not remove the terrine just yet.

Put some weight onto the terrine so to keep it pressed and compact and leave overnight in the fridge until ready to serve.

To reveal the terrine, carefully remove the foil on top and turn upside down and completely remove the foil. Serve in slices with salad. If served as a main course, potatoes would go well with it.