Tag Archives: Pork

Roasted Pork Shoulder with a Masala Rub

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Masala Pork Shoulder
My normal tendency with pork shoulder is to cube it and do something vaguely vindaloo’ish with it (see here and here). On Sunday, however, I was feeling too lazy to cut the shoulder up and didn’t really want to stand over the stove on another hot day. And so, I decided to marinate the whole thing and bung it into the fridge for a day and deal with it on Monday, forecast to be a much cooler day. I am happy to report that the weather did not play me false and that the improvized spice rub worked out really well. I did overcook it a little bit—I don’t do whole roasts very often and when I do, I don’t like pulling things out of the oven to stick meat thermometers into them; I play it by feel instead and sometimes it goes a little bit over. Not the end of the world, and the more capable roaster (such as yourself) will have no trouble getting that part of it fixed to your satisfaction.

Anyway, on to the pork!  Continue reading →

Red Pork

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Red Pork
I made this recently for a dinner party. I’m tempted to call it a vindaloo but then my Parsi and Goan friends might get angry. It’s generally in the vindaloo family in that it involves pork, vinegar and garlic but it is not a vindaloo: this is me messing around with a pork shoulder with general taste memories of proper vindaloo in mind. Proper vindaloo, in case you’re wondering, is made with pork. It is not made with lamb or beef or chicken as Indian restaurants in the US, afflicted by the curse of complete substitutability, may have led you to believe. Sweet, fatty pork is the meat for vindaloo—the only acceptable subsitute is duck. And the other necessary ingredients of a proper vindaloo, as indicated by the name, and as many North Indians also do not know, are vinegar and garlic. If I had a dollar for every time someone has told me that a vindaloo is made with vinegar and potato (alu/aloo in most North Indian languages) I’d be able to buy some Yamazaki 18 at the current price.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m going on about vindaloo as this is not one—I believe I may have already noted this. What it is though is tangy, sweet and just a bit spicy and if your tastebuds and soul are not dead you will like it. It’s best made a day ahead.

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Dry-Fried Smoked Pork with Asparagus

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Dry Fried Pork with Asparagus
We could say this is to mark the end of asparagus season. Or we could say that I noticed that there was some asparagus in the fridge that was nearing the end of its life and could still be salvaged by snapping the top halves off. As there wasn’t enough of it for a dish in its own right, I decided to add the asparagus to the pork stir-fry I’d been planning for lunch. And I roughly adapted the recipe for dry-fried chicken in Fuchsia Dunlop’s excellent Sichuan cookbook, Land of Plenty. I’ve made this before with strips of pork and a range of vegetables—her recipe calls for chicken and celery but she notes that it can be made with all kinds of vegetables. The pork I was using was something called “smoked ham steak”—one of the cuts we got when we purchased a whole pig from a local butcher in February. I wasn’t really sure what this was going to be but it turned out to be smoked ham on the bone cut into two thick slices. As it was already ready to eat this made the dish an even quicker prep and the smoke added a nice touch.

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Pork and Beans, Indian Style

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Pork and Beans
Here’s a bonus recipe that is probably also the easiest recipe I will ever post. This is because it assumes that you have already made this pork. All you then have to do is cook some beans and at the very end add 3-4 ladles of the pork to the bean pot and simmer it all together till the beans are done. What you are basically doing here is adding the spiced pork as a “tadka” to the almost-cooked beans. As always, I use heirloom beans from my friend Steve’s company, Rancho Gordo but, obviously, any good beans will do—and you want to be cooking good beans because you want good pot liquor to add the dry pork to. And frankly there are no beans in the US better than Rancho Gordo beans.

In this recipe I used Rancho Gordo’s monstrously large Royal Corona beans—when fully cooked each bean is almost as large as a tablespoon—but this will work just as well with any beans that are good for pork and beans (such as Rancho Gordo’s Red Nightfall or Sangre de Toro). That said, I prefer a milder bean like the Royal Corona because its pot liquor/broth allows the flavour of the spiced pork to come through clearly (their Cassoulet or Alubia Criollos would be great too). But see what works for you. Continue reading →

Spicy and Tangy Pork

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Pork
Along with some friends we recently purchased half a steer headed to slaughter. It was a fairly large animal and even after processing and dry-aging for about three weeks our share of the meat came to about 80lbs. I’d purchased a very large freezer to hold the meat easily (the last time we did this our regular freezer was overwhelmed) and it is so big that 80 lbs of beef barely took up any room in it. So, of course, I went out and got half a pig (being able to do this kind of thing on a whim is among the few benefits of living in a semi-rural part of the upper Midwest). The goddamned freezer still seems less than half full and we have a lot of beef and pork to eat. Luckily, these are all animals raised without hormones and antibiotics and in fairly “humane” conditions. Anyway, all this is to say that those of you interested in my recipe posts can look forward to a fair number of beef and pork recipes in the months ahead. (And goat and lamb too—this is a monstrous freezer indeed.)

First up, here’s a version of a spicy and tangy pork dish that I have been making to some acclaim for about 10 years now. The exact ingredients are never quite the same and I vary the consistency of the gravy from time to time, but insofar as it is constant it’s a rough pass at versions of some pork dishes I’ve eaten in the homes of family friends from southwestern parts of India. So it’s not a specific regional recipe; but, to blow my horn twice in one paragraph, it is very good. Try it; you will like it. And if you have the ingredients it is very easy to pull together. Continue reading →