SC - Rotisserie and Cormary

[Olwen the Odd]

Jenne Heise wrote:
> 
> My friend Sara and I set out to try some period recipes this weekend. We
> were working from the recipes translated in _The Medeival Kitchen_ with
> the authors notes and redactionsmostly treated as notes.
> One of the dishes we wanted to try was Carmary, Loin of pork marinated in
> Red Wine. Sara just got a rotisserie oven, and we looked at one another
> and said, "Roast on a Spit! This should work!" So we got a 3lb bone-in
> pork loin, marinated it, put it in the rotisserie, and according to the
> directions, cooked it for an hour and 20 minutes. It wasn't done: we ended
> up cutting it into slices and broiling the slices.

How "not done" was it? Was it simply raw in the middle, or was it just
not-sufficiently-plywood-like to be recognizable by
them-as-likes-it-that-way to be considered done? I ask because 20
minutes for the roast and 20 minutes per pound is a fairly good (and
fairly common) indicator of doneness when you're cooking in an oven, and
a lot of people aren't aware that rare pork (cooked, say, to an internal
temperature of 145 degrees F.) is perfectly safe with regard to the
major perceived threat of trichinosis, which is killed at 137 degrees F.

> Two questions:
> 1) Is a rotisserie a good thing to try to approximate spit-roasting?

It _ought_ to be; it's designed to be; whether it is or not is a measure
of the success of the equipment and technique.
 
> 2) Did it just need more time (it was getting pretty crunchy on the
> outside) or should we assume pork doesn't work well in (this particular)
> rotisserie?

I wonder if it's not designed for larger pieces of meat... maybe
something like an unstuffed chicken would probably be OK because despite
its size and shape equate to meat maybe two inches thick, maximum, but
when you get to something larger, or even a stuffed chicken, which has
to be cooked completely through, this may be too much for the machine.

Has anybody ever successfully roasted a chicken in a toaster-oven ;  )  ?

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com