Pork braise with bunya nut and Australian rice grass

Serves: 4

Difficulty:

Ingredients

4 pork hocks
3 litres chicken stock
1 onion diced
1 chopped chilli
½ teaspoon Wildfire Spice
½ teaspoon Lemon Myrtle
1½ teaspoons Alpine Pepper
200g brown rice
50g Australian rice grass
50g Inuit wild rice
12 bunya nuts (24 halves)
160g snowpeas

Method

1. Preheat your oven or BBQ to about 180°C
2. stab the meat of the hocks with a narrow blade knife making an incision which fits your finger; sprinkle Alpine Pepper into the cuts so that the flavours can penetrate all the way through the meat as it cooks
3. in a hot, oiled, deep roasting pan, brown the hocks on all surfaces to flavour the outside; once half done, add the onion to brown it as well
4. once browned, remove from the heat and pour in the stock and add the chilli
5. cover the meat with aluminium foil ensuring that the plasticized metal sheet does not touch the meat but sits proud; if this is not possible, cover the meat with a piece of baking paper or paperbark and then cover with the foil; (the main thing is to never let anything you will actually eat, be cooked in contact with foil, see page 134)
6. place in the oven for 2-3 hours or until the meat easily pulls away from the bone; the pan can be uncovered for the last 30 minutes of this time (when you can also start to cook the rice as below)
7. once the hocks are cooked, remove them from the liquid and set aside in a warm place
8. pull all of the meat away from the bones
9. reduce the liquid in the pan to ¼ the original volume; strain off and season this sauce with Wildfire Spice to taste
10. boil the bunya nut halves in a minimum of water and then allow them to cool in this water, this will make it easy to get them out of the shells; use almonds if bunya nuts are hard to get and you can boil them or dry roast them as is your preference, either way, chop the nuts coarsely
11. start to cook the rices:
12. add the brown rice and the rice grass to a saucepan which can be fitted with a lid; cover the rice with water so that the water covers the rice by 1½ times as much again as the depth of rice; said in another way; you can measure the 200g of rice and add 300ml of water; note that if you were cooking white rice using this absorption method only 200ml of water would be needed
13. for the rice grass (or Inuit wild rice), follow the above directions as for white rice and use a small saucepan
14. to cook the rices, bring the water to the boil and continue boiling until the water boils down to within the surface of the rice; turn the heat down to a gentle simmer and fit the lid to the saucepan; continue simmering for 10 minutes or until the rice is cooked as indicated by ‘blow hole’ in the surface of the swollen rice; remove from heat once done; place the snow peas ontop of the rice and cover till required to serve.

Styling

Serve the rices in a deep or flat bowl, topped with the braised pork, bunya and snow peas. Dust with Lemon Myrtle.

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Dining Downunder Cookbook
This Australian recipe of Pork braise with bunya nut and Australian rice grass is included in the Dining Downunder Cookbook which can be purchased online at the Dining Downunder Online Shop. Also available online is a wide range of native Australian herbs and spices, sauces, syrups, infused oils and bush tucker ingredients such as wattleseed and paperbark rolls.

Episode: Lillipilli in the Rocks

Recipe By: Mark McCluskey

This recipe is a little ahead of its time in that it has an ingredient, Australian rice grass, which is only just entering commercialization stages. It may be a few more years before it is widely available but small amounts are beginning to enter selected gourmet stores. A substitute is the Canadian wild rice harvested and widely marketed as Inuit rice but it is really closer to the nutty dryland rice grasses of Arizona in the USA.

Pork braise with bunya nut and Australian rice grass

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