Is your life non-stop and always on the go? Not always in the mood to make a full-course meal when you get home from work but there are hungry mouths waiting to be fed nonetheless? If you’ve answered yes then read on because I have you covered in this edition of our Fornetto blog!
Not only is this meal easy, satisfying and nutritious but clean-up is a breeze as well! The Fornetto bread cloche and the baking stone were used here, not just for cooking an entire roast dinner including dessert but for serving it as well.
A complete roast dinner in the cloche, an apple dessert with ice-cream on the baking stone and guess what; the dreaded clean-up after a dinner like this can now be a thing of the past. Not only that but the cloche makes a roast dinner so easy to prepare that it no longer needs to be reserved only for Sundays!
It’s as simple as what you see here for a full roast dinner for 4 from your Fornetto. Choose what you’d like to roast such as beef, chicken, pork or lamb and a selection of seasonal vegetables. Don’t forget your favourite herbs and spices. Click on the link for the recipe.
If you really are too busy to make a homemade stuffing feel free to buy a mix at the store. I’ve kept my recipe really basic with only 4 ingredients and it’s well worth the 5 minutes it takes to prepare! Click on the link for the recipe.
Apples, baked in puff-pastry with pecan crumble topping. Not hard to make and well worth your while after a long day at the office! Click on the link for the recipe.
A large meal on a Sunday afternoon traditionally has it’s roots firmly planted in most of Europe but a roast dinner has been well entrenched particularly in Britain and Ireland. Today, a Sunday roast is common place throughout most of the Anglosphere and many other non-British or Irish influenced countries have adopted the tradition as well. Customarily, in Yorkshire, England, preparing a cut of meat and placing it in a slow oven before leaving for church service in the morning is still done today.
The roast would then be just about ready to eat when the family arrived back home after church and leaving just enough time to prepare the sides. This meal has always been a laborious undertaking as preparing all the sides to coincide with the roast to ensure that everything was still hot when served was no easy feat however, with modern day inventions such as the microwave, heating up side-dishes such as roast potatoes is quite simple. Yet that doesn’t mean that all those pesky pots and pans with burnt bits left behind on them don’t need a good soaking and scrubbing!
What’s unique about roasting in a cloche is that it allows for dry air to circulate. Unlike a stew pot or a tajine that once is filled and the lid is placed over it creates a seal that keeps dry oven air out completely and only allows steam to escape through the top as needed. So how does this pertain to cooking in the cloche and what exactly does it all mean? The bread cloche has a shallow baking dish and a large domed lid of the equal circumference that meets the sides.
Stew pots come with a lid that’s slightly smaller and that’s meant to fit inside the rim of the base. As the meat and vegetables begin to cook inside a dry cloche, steam is created and is condensed inside the lid returning it to the bottom dish, this is where the “jus” will form without the addition of any outside liquids. This “jus” created from the meat and vegetables seasoned with herbs and spices make for an ideal gravy! As the temperature rises more steam is created inside the cloche and is released at the sides as needed.
At the same time, as the steam is circulating inside the dome, hot dry air is pulled through the sides and over the roast and vegetables, allowing them to brown while retaining all of their natural juices. This convection phenomenon does not happen with a dish that does not allow dry air to circulate.
Because of this, the cloche is ideal and succeeds at cooking a roast dinner and making excellent bread, whereas a vessel that seals dry oven air out would fail.
With all of your roast dinner ingredients in the bread cloche simply cook for one and a half hours covered and a half hour uncovered at 170 ℃ (350℉). Roasting times will vary depending on size and type of meat.
Uncovering your roast for the last half an hour of cooking will crisp up the outside of your roast, finish browning the vegetables and reduce the liquid in the bottom to a delicious gravy. You should baste the roast and vegetables at this point and again 15 minutes later.
Once you remove the roast from the oven, put your dessert in to bake. Remove 40 minutes later when it’s golden brown as above and serve hot, warm or at room temperature.
Quarter chicken leg with stuffing and roasted vegetables from the Fornetto bread cloche. Click on this link for the recipe.
Apple crumble puff pastry tart done perfectly on the Fornetto baking stone. Ready by the time you finish your roast. A dollop of vanilla ice-cream and caramel and you’re in business! See recipe at this link.
It seems to me that the hustle and bustle high-speed lifestyle that many of us lead today, between picking up the kids from school or sports practice and finishing off deadlines at work, has a lot of us out there looking for no-fuss, easy and complete meal ideas. The Fornetto ceramics make cooking, serving and clean-up a breeze. And remember, if you don’t yet own a Fornetto, the line of ceramics are ideal for use in your conventional electric or gas oven as well.
