Yes, if I had to choose one major weakness, it would be meat. Yes, red meat. I love it and find so many wonderful qualities in it, I can't imagine a vegetarian lifestyle for myself. Don't get me wrong, I love veggies too and couldn't imagine a world without them, either.. not only that but truthfully most nights it's chicken breast and steamed veg these days. But what would my world be without fond? Gravy? Drippings? Lifeless, I tell you.
Each time I go to the meat counter, I feel the possibilities of what to cook spreading themselves out before me - potentiality fileted like a sirloin ready to receive a generous stuffing of creativity and yum. Sometimes I'm uninspired, or the standing rib is the only thing calling to me and I lack the spare $45 it would take to feed the urge to roast. But sometimes I give in to just the right thing and magic happens. Which brings me to the beautiful pork shoulder at Safeway. It was $2.49 a pound, and I simply couldn't resist.
But pork is fatty, you say..
But pork isn't practical, you say..
Shoulder is a long-cook meat - and you have NO TIME, you say?!
Bah! We will make time, we will eat a reasonable portion, and we will make it work!
Defiantly, I bought an $8 roast that weighed more than many newborns, and vowed to do it justice and spread it over many meals to make the purchase and fat content justifiable. I had a friend tell me recently that he finds pork to be a little bit less than flavorful, and not a 'tasty meat.' Huh. I couldn't disagree more, and I set out to prove it. Not to him, but to myself.*
I did my usual thing - I went online and checked all of my usual sources for recipes and found a few that sounded like something that would deliver both flavor and accessibility. I'm sure that chipotle-starfruit glazed star-anise studded rotisserie pork shoulder would be a masterpiece *if* I ever kept any of those ingredients on hand. Sadly, the cupboards are a bit bare at the moment, so a beer braising it would have to be. (Note: don't leave anything in my fridge you're particularly attached to - it may be pilfered for culinary experimentation.)
I started with a recipe called "Loli's Liquid Pork" from a food writer in New Orleans. I then messed around with it a bit and got the following. I'm not sure what to call it, since the idea of "Liquid Pork" makes even me throw up a little in my mouth. So we'll just call it...
- Gwynne's Beer-Braised Pork Shoulder
4 to 10lb pork roast (mine was about 4.5 lbs)
favorite Cajun seasoning mix (I used a mix from Charleston, SC called, simply, "Tasty.")
3 Tbsp flour
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp salt (optional - if your Cajun spice mix is salty, no additional salt is needed)
4 cloves of garlic per pound of roast
About 3 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 onion per 2 pounds of roast, coarsely chopped
24oz broth or beer (2 bottles - I used Anchor Steam and it was perfect. But any beer that isn't super bitter will do well, I bet.)
1 cup apple cider or juice
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
Heat a heavy dutch oven (just larger than your roast if possible) on medium high on the stove. Add oil. Preemptively turn on your fan and/or open a window - this process gets smoky at first.
Put flour, pepper, and spice mix in a large plastic bag (produce bags work great, or a ziploc is cool too.) Pat the roast dry and place it in the bag, free of any string or binding and shake, coating the roast with the flour mixture.
Cut slits into the roast and fill each with a peeled, half-smashed garlic clove. Brown all sides of the roast. Add the rest of the flour mix from the bag to the pot. Brown the flour and allow it to soak up all of the oil and juices in the skillet. Scrape the bottom of the pot to make sure any of the brown bits on the bottom end up as a part of the flour & oil mixture (mmmmm... fond & roux, what a team!)
Pick the roast up with a fork and throw down half the onions to make a little bed for it. Put the roast back in on top of the onions, and arrange the rest around and on the roast. Add the beer and the apple juice/cider; it should come about 1/2 way up the sides of the meat.
Cover it with a nicely fitting lid, and keep the heat on high until the whole thing is at a rolling boil. Leave it there for a few minutes to get your dutch oven good and hot, then turn down the heat to medium low - I was at about 4 on my electric stove. You want it simmering rather briskly, not 'blooping' (as my mom used to say.) Feel free to bloop or leave it in a slow cooker all day if you want - I'm sure that would work just fine if you had 8-11 hours to spare. I wanted mine in 6, so I kept an eye on it and kept it agitated. (It ended up being 5.5, because the house smelled so good we couldn't wait another minute.)
Keep an eye on it, and turn the roast over once or twice an hour to prevent it sticking in the hot spots on the pot once the onions have disintegrated. Then go about your day as planned (mine was housecleaning and decorating in prep for my big Stone Soup party next weekend) and enjoy the smell of sweet, glorious meat wafting from your kitchen.
At about the 4.5/5 hour mark, you'll notice that the roast loses its connective tissue completely and turns the corner from 'roast' to 'lump of soft meat'. This is good - if you serve it before that point, you won't be nearly as happy with the tenderness. Anytime after that release point is fine to take it off, but it will only get better with time. The key is to make sure that you don't let your juices run dry. It's a good idea to have some broth handy in case you're running too hot and you burn off your liquid too quickly.
Eventually you won't be able to stand it anymore, and you'll have to eat the darned thing. Remove the roast bits gently with two big forks to a separate bowl, and either use the pan gravy as is, or if it needs to be reduced further, go ahead and do that in the open dutch oven over a medium heat. The roux we made in the first step should be enough thickener. Note: This is where the oversalting will rear its ugly head if it was done in the first step. The meat won't care and will be better for it, but the sauce (having been reduced to within an inch of its life) will be inedible if you didn't take it easy in the dredging.
Et voila! A lovely Sunday dinner replete with aromatic house. And I didn't even have to turn on the oven. I served it with some quickly done mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli. Both let the pork and sauce shine as the star of the meal.
The heat of the black pepper came through with the cajun spices, which I really liked. Not overpoweringly so, but enough to wake me up a bit. The apple juice lends just a tiny hint of sweetness, which is always welcome with pork. But not enough to trigger my "no sweet with meat" issue. (More about that another time.) The pork itself was amazingly tender (you would be too if you took a 6 hour bath in 212 degree soup) but still retained a lot of its porky flavor - one of the glories of shoulder, I suppose.
I wish I had photo-blogged this, as it's the inaugural post and everything. But I'm just beginning, and hopefully I'll get more creative as things progress. Thanks for reading! Please comment if you try this or plan on it - I'd love to hear about your results.
* Okay - you caught me - I really didn't have anything to prove, I just wanted more pork. Can you really blame me?
