Tag: pork shoulder

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Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

200. Roast Pork Shoulder Cubano: Puerco Asado p.477


The recipe

Very few things in life are as good, or as simple as roast pork. The bachelor party tradition among my group of friends is to spit-roast a pig over charcoal. We recently went in on a roaster and put it through it’s paces before my wedding. Spending the afternoon hanging out and watching the pig spin is as near a perfect Saturday as I can imagine. The beauty of roasting pork is that you really don’t have to do much of anything to it, you just have to be very patient and let it get there in it’s own time. Even if you only rub it with salt, it will be fantastic. A few well chosen herbs and spices can make it even better, but you don’t want to overwhelm the awesome goodness that is roast pork. This recipe comes pretty close to replicating what I love about a whole rotisserie pig. If you don’t happen to have a giant roasting pit, or twenty friends to help you eat a whole pig, an oven roasted pork shoulder is a good way to go.

In this recipe starts with an 8 lb skin on picnic shoulder. The higher end grocery stores in my neighbourhood never carry these (one of them doesn’t carry any part of a pig or cow forward of the tenderloin), but they’re a staple at the more budget minded stores. At a dollar a pound, I can’t afford not to cook with pork shoulder. You start by stabbing 1 inch incisions in the skin with a very very sharp knife. This is by far the hardest part of the recipe, but it’s a nice way to get some aggression out. You then fill these incisions with a mixture of lime juice, garlic, salt, oregano, and cumin. More of the mixture gets rubbed onto the meat not covered with skin. The pork goes into the oven, with lime juice drizzled around it. The recipe asks for a roasting pan, but I used a dutch oven, which worked out just fine. After 30 minutes water and vinegar are added to the pan, and it’s left to roast covered for two hours, basting halfway through, and making sure not to get the precious cracklings wet. You then separate the skin from the meat, and roast uncovered for another hour and a half, basting under the skin every 20 minutes. When the skin is crackly and crisp you remove the roast and let it stand for 20 minutes, then carve. It’s served with the defatted pan juices, and cracklings.

The Good: This tastes absolutely fantastic. The meat is rich and succulent, mildly flavoured by the spices, but not so much as to distract you from the porcine bullet to the taste centers of your brain. The cracklings were out of this world. They turned a perfect mahogany, and with an extra sprinkle of salt became the perfect indulgence. Other than getting through the pig skin, the recipe was dead simple, used very easy to find ingredients, and even the poorest students can afford to make it.

The Bad: Preparing this can be a little dangerous. If you don’t have wickedly sharp knives, they’re likely to turn on you when trying to get through the skin. I nearly cut myself. A double edged knife, dagger, shiv, or any other type of stabbing weapon would probably be a lot safer. This recipe also takes quite a long time (count on five hours from start to finish), and sitting around the oven drinking beer has less appeal than the hypnotic rotation of a pig on the spit. That said, there’s very little intervention needed on your part. Making this again I would try to slice it. It kind of fell apart and came away in chunks. It’s basically pulled pork, so why not pull it? Next time I’ll pull the meat, and toss it with a little of the pan juices.

The Verdict: Eight dollars resulted in a fantastic dinner, and out of this world sandwiches for two for most of a week. Beat that. There are amazing things that can be done with pork shoulder, but a lot of them require special equipment, or more intervention on your part than this dish. If you do have a charcoal grill, this dish would probably be even better with long slow offset cooking, regular basting, and some smoke. But turning on the oven sure is a lot simpler, and nearly as delicious.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

186. Lillie’s North Carolina Chopped Barbecue p.479

I can’t find a copy of this recipe online.

Barbecue is one of those things I would dearly love to know a whole lot more about. But living in Montreal means that I’m unlikely to stumble across BBQ competitions, and there are very few pit masters looking to take on an apprentice. My lack of a back yard, or even a charcoal grill makes the situation even worse. This recipe was designed for us city dwellers who want to give apartment barbecue a try. This recipe comes as close as possible to making real barbecue without access to an open flame. It’s basically braised pork shoulder flavoured with cider vinegar, carrot, celery, onion, garlic, and peppercorns. The braised pork is doused in cider vinegar and roasted in the oven for an hour. The pork is then chopped, and mixed with Tomato Barbecue Sauce and warmed through. It’s supposed to be served with white rolls and coleslaw, but it went well with swiss chard and sweet potatoes.

The Good: The real plus of this recipe is that it kinda tastes like barbecue, and you can do it in the kitchen at any time of the year. The pork was moist with a nicely crisped exterior, and the long braise got a lot of flavour into the meat. I’m always a fan of using pork shoulder, because it’s very very inexpensive, and wonderfully flavourful. I think it’s got the best dollar to flavour ratio of any cut of meat out there.

The Bad: Vinegar. The Tomato Barbecue Sauce was too heavy on the vinegar all on it’s own, but the pork was braised in vinegar, then roasted and basted with vinegar before being mixed with a vinegar barbecue sauce. Everyone felt a little bit pickled after dinner.

The Verdict: Overall this was a fairly successful technique for barbecue without a barbecue. It utterly failed to recreate the smoky goodness of outdoor grilling, but sometimes you take what you can get. I know barbecue purists look down on liquid smoke, but I’d consider adding a few dashes when they’re not looking. The flavours in this dish were generally good, and the meat was wonderfully falling apart tender, but the acid was just too much for me to fully get behind.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

183. Georgian Pork Stew p.485


The recipe

The Georgian Salsa called ajika, which I blogged about last time totally blew me away. This pork stew uses a lot of the same flavours, and integrates the ajika as an important ingredient, so predictably, I like it a lot. The stew uses some unusual ingredients including summer savory, corriander seeds, fenugreek, and dried marigolds, but nothing I had too much trouble finding.

I really like it when The Book pushes my limits and asks me to try new and different things, but I simultaneously curse The Book for sending me running all over the city trying to find exotic components, and damn them for not using the unusual ingredients that I have easy access to in their recipes. They have to draw a fine line between authenticity and simplicity in designing these recipes, and no matter where they make their stand someone is going to be upset. In general I’ve got to give them credit for striking a fairly good balance, or at least what seems like a good balance to someone living in a major metropolitan centre with easy access to a specialty shops. I imagine trying to do this project in Smalltown USA with nothing but a Megamart at your disposal would be a challenge. From my perspective getting to crush up flowers and put them in my dinner was good fun, but it might be a deal breaking frustration for other cooks out there.

The method for this stew is a little bit unusual. You begin by adding cubed and seasoned pork shoulder to a covered pot without any oil, then turning the heat to high and letting the pork steam for 10 minutes, only stirring it once. I read that instruction about five times because it sounded so unsual, but it worked, the pork released juices and steamed instead of burning or sticking as I feared it would. After 10 minutes the lid is removed and the pork juices are allowed to evaporate, still over high heat. Once the liquid is gone, oil is added and the meat is sautéed until well browned. While that’s going on you make a paste of garlic, summer savory, and salt, which is added to the browned meat and cooked for a minute. You then grind corriander and fenugreek and add them along with chopped red onion, and marigold and cook for a few minutes. A cup of water is added, and stew is braised for an hour. Once the meat is tender fresh cilantro, Georgian salsa, and pepper are stirred in. The stew is served with more of the ajika on the side, and with pomegranite seeds sprinkled on top (which I never got around to).

I don’t think the steam-before-you-sear technique did good things to my pork. I can see this sort of technique working well with a really fatty and tough piece of pork shoulder, but my relatively lean supermarket pork didn’t survive the process very well. The meat gives up a lot of it’s moisture, which evaporates before the meat is browned. The expectation is that the moisture would re-penetrate the meat during braising, and that there would be enough fat in the meat to keep it moist. That didn’t happen for me, the meat gave up it’s moisture, and never really got it back. Nothing is quite as frustrating as a dish that simmered for hours, but somehow ends up dry.

Other than that fairly major complaint the dish was excellent. The flavours were absolutely spot on. The ajika is amazing, and the additional herbs really brought the dish home. The sauce was irresistible, I’m willing to admit that I went at the sauce with a spoon while pretending to put it away in the fridge. I’m convinced that a better piece of pork would have allowed this technique to work, and deliver succulent meat along with the incredible sauce. If you’re using bog-standard grocery store pork I’d recommend skipping the steaming step, browning and braising should be sufficient to tenderise the meat without driving all the moisture out.

Had the pork worked out this would be a no brainer for a five star rating. Dry pork is a fairly major flaw, so I should penalize it heavily, but all said and done I still really enjoyed this meal, and can’t bear to give it less than a

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

145. Cider Braised Pork Shoulder with Caramelized Onions p.476


The recipe

I love to braise. It’s almost worth suffering through the interminable and bitter winter of Montreal to do it. Of course you could braise all year round if you really wanted to, but somehow simmering meat for hours in the middle of July just doesn’t sound like a good idea. Braised meats are delicious, so I’ve tried letting someone in the kitchen at a restaurant suffer through the heat, and ordered it. Unfortunately it’s just too heavy to be enjoyable, and the process of doing it myself is one of my favourite parts. You really need a miserably blustery day to truly appreciate the joys of a good braise. I love the side benefits of the whole house smelling wonderful for a day, and the comforting knowledge that dinner is getting itself ready, and the more you ignore it the better it will be. With our oil heating, leaving the stove on is also a pretty economical way to heat the house.

You can’t beat a braise for thrift either. You can keep your precious tenderloins, give me the gnarliest, toughest, and cheapest cut of meat you can find, and it will turn to gold after a few hours with Le Creuset. It’s amazing to see this awful slab of meat transformed. The fat renders, and gets skimmed away, the connective tissue dissolves and become that elixir of mouth-feel, gelatin, and even the toughest cuts yeild to a fork. Those braising bits have so much more flavour than the quick searing cuts of meat, it just takes a little time to coax it out.

This recipe starts with a skin-on picnic ham. You score the skin, and insert cloves of garlic into the meat, add salt and pepper, and then brown it thoroughly in a heavy pot (cast iron is your friend). Once the meat is browned, you remove it, and sauté a whole whack of onions in the pot. When the onions turn golden, you add unfiltered apple cider, and the meat back to the pot. Then you seal it up, stick it in a 325 oven, and walk away for the next three hours or so. When you’re ready to serve, you remove the meat, and reduce the braising liquid to two cups. If the lid of your pot doesn’t have an extremely tight seal this will have happened naturally.

You can serve the pork right away, but it’ll taste better if you let it cool in the braising liquid, refrigerate it overnight, and then serve it for dinner the following day. This also makes defatting the sauce easy. The recipe doesn’t call for it, but I think it’s a necessary step. There’s a huge amount of fat on a pork shoulder, and most of it melts into the sauce. Even if you don’t have time to cool it it’s worth letting the liquid sit, and skimming part of the fat away. That’s one of the recipe’s biggest weaknesses. I defatted my sauce, but I don’t think I would have enjoyed it nearly as much if I’d followed the recipe exactly.

Recipes are never very specific about how much you should brown meat for a braise. Older books spout that nonsense about sealing in flavour, but really you’re building flavour. The darker the meat gets, without burning, the more flavourful your braise will turn out. There’s nothing at all wrong with your browned meat looking more than a little black, just avoid billowing clouds of smoke.

Braised pork shoulders are always good, it’s nearly impossible to mess a recipe like this up. This particular braise was minimalist, with just a few ingredients. I think it could have easily accommodated another flavour, a sprig of thyme would have done wonders. It was also a little unbalanced, both the onions and the cider were very sweet, and a little vinegar would have been welcome. The texture was excellent, succulent and falling apart, with a thick hearty sauce to go along with he meat. It made quite a nice dinner, but it was an outrageously good sandwich the following day.

The recipe’s biggest weakness was the skipping of the defatting step, other than that I have only minor quibbles. If you’re OK with sweeter meat dishes, leave it as is, if not go with some cider vinegar. I’d add herbs depending on my mood, it’s very nice even without them. If you don’t braise a lot, this recipe is certainly worth trying. And, if not this recipe, then some recipe, get out there and eat low on the hog.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

129. Posole: Pork and Hominy Stew p.486


Epicurious doesn’t have a recipe for this one, but one of the posole recipes I found on there looks great, and might address some of my concerns with this dish.

I was really excited to make this. My dining companion came home raving about the posole at Le Jolifou, a great Montreal restaurant which specializes in Mexican inspired Québécois dishes. A couple of weeks later we looked through The Book, and tried its take on posole. I can safely say that this recipe didn’t live up to Le Jolifou’s exacting standards.

Posole is a Mexican stew, which usually features pork and chiles and always features hominy (confusingly also called posole). This was my first experience with hominy, which are corn kernels that have had the outer hull removed by soaking in an alkaline solution. This is a really cool example of ancient food chemistry. At some point someone decided to boil their corn with a handful of ashes from the fireplace, and found that the corn tasted better and the family was healthier. The treatment makes the corn kernels more digestible, more nutrients become available, and it’s nutritionally complete enough to be a staple food. Without this process people surviving on corn will become malnourished and develop pellagra. Europeans brought maize back from the new world, but didn’t treat it, and pellagra became widespread. I’ve idly wondered what the difference between polenta and grits was for a while, and now I know. Polenta is made from untreated corn meal, while grits are made with treated corn meal, simple, but it wasn’t obvious. If you’re looking to geek out on more food science check out the Wikipedia page on this process, called nixtamalization.

Despite my affection for hominy, this posole wasn’t great. It’s simple to make, just soak pasilla and guajillo chiles in water, then run them through the blender with oregano, salt, cumin seeds, pepper, garlic, tomato, and onion. You then simmer cubed pork shoulder in this sauce for an hour, add canned hominy, and continue to simmer for half an hour more. The stew is served with any combination of radishes, onion, cilantro, lettuce, chiles, lime wedges, and tortillas or tortilla chips.

The sauce has some very nice flavours to it, and I love pork braised with chiles, but the texture wasn’t great. I’m not really sure what happened, but my pork cubes ended up tough and dry, swimming in a thin sauce, with a huge amount of hominy. I would have preferred a thicker chunkier sauce, perhaps leaving the tomato and onion out of the blender, or mashing some of the hominy would have helped to thicken it up. I also would have preferred to shred the pork into the sauce. I found the chunks too big, and not amazingly flavorful. The recipe calls for three 15 oz cans of hominy, which should really be reduced to two. The other recipe I linked calls for 26 cloves of garlic, the version in The Book calls for only one. I’m not sure if I’d up the garlic quite so drastically, but I’d seek out a happy middle. The hominy itself was really interesting, it has a very unique chewy texture, which I liked. I’m not sure I’d really want to eat a whole lot of it at one sitting, it reminded me a bit of the tapioca balls in bubble tea.

As with most stews the posole improved with age. By day three the pork had soaked in more flavour, and softened, and the whole dish was more cohesive. It was perfectly edible, and even enjoyable, but my dining companion’s stellar dinner out had really built up my expectations for this posole, it just couldn’t live up to them.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

62. Char Siu p.478

The recipe

This recipe was a bit of effort, but boy was it worth it. The ingredients are simple and readily available, and they come together in the most delightful way with the judicious application of heat. The recipe calls for a 1 pound boneless pork butt or shoulder. I bought a whole picnic ham (from the shoulder, but with bones and skin left on), and had to figure out how to butcher it myself. I tried leaving the skin on to see if it would end up edible, it didn’t, but no big loss. Score one for the scientific method.

In this recipe strips of pork are marinated in hoisin, soy, sake, honey, ginger, and garlic. The pork is then roasted on a rack in the oven over a pan of water. The marinade is cooked down, and used to baste the pork strips regularly throughout the cooking. It’s really like painting on layers of flavour. The water keeps things moist, and the marinade caramelizes into sticky gold. As the layers of marinade build up the caramel colour deepens it starts to get really difficult to wait for it to be done.

Because so much effort is put into getting as much of the marinade as possible to stick to the pork it ends up being quite intensely flavored. Sweet, salty, and perfumed with garlic and ginger. It’s meant to be one of many small dishes in a Chinese meal, and it’s powerful enough that you can’t eat too much of it. I absolutely loved it, but after about four slices I was finished. The recipe mentions that once made and frozen this pork becomes a valuable commodity, excellent for adding just a bit to a stir fry, or rice. I absolutely have to agree. I ended up with a good bit of leftovers, and I used it to full advantage. It was excellent in a cold sandwich, stirred into scrambled eggs, and as an ingredient in a stir fry from The Book.

Better than the dish itself was the thinking behind it. It’s loaded with the innovation and creativity of limited resources. It takes an inexpensive and unloved part of the pig, and brings out it’s best with some tenderizing and flavorful marinade. Then it goes to great lengths to use that marinade to best advantage. Better yet, the final dish makes a little meat go a long way. In a more reasonable food economy where meat is a valuable and limited resource a little bit of this pork could bring a lot of flavour to other dishes. You can probably get as much meat enjoyment from a little bit of this, as you would from eating a big steak.

Moving this dish in and out of the oven to baste it every few minutes was sticky and somewhat irritating work. I had to jurry rig a rack over pan system, and I came close to sending the pork for a swim in the water bath more than once. I didn’t enjoy cleaning up the little dribbles of marinade that seemed to get cooked onto every available surface, but I absolutely enjoyed the dish. Since is freezes so well I’d suggest doubling the recipe and keeping more of this stuff on hand than you think you’ll need.