Crown roasts to me have always seemed rather intimidating. So when my father decided that he wanted to make a crown pork roast for the benefit of any of our readers who actually might want to tackle it one day, I happily went along.

Here's the deal. A crown roast of pork is nothing more than a bunch of pork rib chops nicely formed into a circle and tied up by your butcher. The butcher does most of the hard work (which is why this roast must be special ordered.) Yes there is stuffing to be made, and your butcher should give you the little paper hats that go over the exposed rib bones for the final presentation (I preferred them without the hats, though Sean of Hedonia's homemade crown roast booties look pretty cool). You need a minimum of 13 ribs to tie up, and that makes for a rather compacted roast. A better size is 18-20 ribs. The general guideline for planning is 2 ribs chops per person, though we, proud meat eaters, could barely finish one each, so it depends on the size of the ribs. Because of the variability of the rib sizes and the overall shape of the roast, timing is a bit hard to gauge. You must use a meat thermometer, we recommend a Polder, or one like it, where the probe stays in the roast the whole time while the roast is cooking, and the read-out unit is outside of the oven.

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