A few weekends ago I roasted a Pork Rib Roast with a friend of mine. Neither one of use had ever eaten one.. let alone cooked one, so it was a bit of an adventure. He and I both enjoy cooking though so we gathered family and his pork reluctant girlfriend and prepared a feast. I’ve included a good number of images that are at the bottom of the post. I think I’ve posted information throughout this post that should explain them all…
The first step was to acquire the hunk of beast. I headed out to The Meat House the night before so see what they could do. I had never been there before so I thought it would be a good opportunity to see how knowledgeable their staff is. I explained to them what I wanted to do and how many people would be there (10) and they were quick to make some good recommendations. In the end I left with two sets of 5 bones wrapped in butchers paper.
I’m a big fan of brining large pieces of meat so I asked if brining this made sense. He said I could cook it without but brining would add to the flavor. After picking up some salt and apple juice from the store I was off and running. It was a simple brine as it was already getting late when I got home. I dissolved some sugar and salt in a pot of water on the stove. When it was all dissolved I dumped in all the ice I could find and some apple juice and let it cool on the porch. Once it was cool enough I added the pork and just let it sit overnight. We have a large screened in porch/storage area that I use to do this sort of thing a lot. It was still winter here in NH as well so it was colder outside then in the fridge anyway. Brines need to be made with different ratios for different meats and times. Just do a google search for brines and pick one you like. You can add and swap things around to your liking. I swapped some water for 100% pure apple juice and I added some cloves I think. It’s no an exact science.. but it adds a lot to the meat. Get the notion that it adds a lot of salt out of your head. It’s not true.
On the day of cooking we drained off the brine and rinsed the pork. After plopping it in the largest roasting pan we could find we rubbed it with some salt, pepper and sage threw it in the oven. We put it up on a roasting rack which ended up being somewhat superfluous. I was expecting there to be a lot of fat dripping out of the meat but there turned out to be very little. Perhaps a few tablespoons. More on this later. The roast rack ended up collapsing under the weight so it provided very little lift anyway.
With the beast cooking we turned to our sides. Earlier in the day we went to a small grocery called ‘On The Vine’ located in Exeter, NH. They are a small store that sells basically produce and some other food items. They have a small bakery, a full deli and fish counter as well as a ‘Meat House’ franchise. They sell very few processed items aside from some candies ect. It was the first time I had been to the shop and we quite pleasantly surprised. We grabbed some carrots, beets, yukon gold potatoes and butternut squash and called it a day.
The beats we cooked very simply, we sliced them and steamed them. They were really fresh and quite naturally sweet so we didn’t need to do anything else. For the carrots Josh wanted to try an Alton Brown glazed carrot recipe. We sliced them and cooked them accordingly and was happy with the result. After reading the recipe I was a little skeptical but they tasted great.
We cooked the squash much more traditionally. We sliced it in half, scooped out the seeds and then placed it on a cookie sheet. We seasoned with salt and pepper and then sprinkled a little bit of brown sugar on. This went into the oven on a low rack beneath the pork and we just let it roast for a long while until it was soft and starting to brown. I don’t remember how long it took but it was a good while, perhaps longer then an hour. When you are roasting a large beast it doesn’t really matter how long these things take. The roast has to cook for several hours so you just pop things in and out as needed. Once it was soft and delicious we scooped the flesh out of the skin and mashed it in a baking dish. We added some butter and more sugar to the top and let it sit, waiting for the pork to come out of the oven.
The final side was a roasted potato recipe I have been making for a few years that I pulled from ‘Real Life Entertaining‘. Basically you chop some yukon gold potato’s and toss them in a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and put them in a single layer on a baking sheet. You grab a couple sprigs of rosemary and put them on top while they cook. You need to toss them a few times to make sure they cook evenly. I, for some reason, always insist on cooking them on tin foil which always ends up being a mistake. Cook them right on the cookie sheet and use a good metal spatula to try and keep as much crisp on them as possible. One trick that I have learned is to season them and let them sit in the bowl for 15 minutes or so before cooking. This will cause the salt to pull some of the moisture out of the potatoes which you can drain off before cooking. If I plan on using the potatoes for breakfast the next morning I do this as it makes it easier to crisp them in a skillet the next day. You’ll notice an image of some pepper being ground with a mortar and pestle, this is not recommended. I had been using one of those pepper grinders you buy at the store but the top broke off and dumped all the pepper out into the potato bowl. Whoops! I had no choice but to start the potatoes again and grind the pepper by hand. I ended up going pretty overboard on the pepper… they were still good but very peppery.
Once the pork had cooked for a while we made up some corn bread stuffing and put it on top of the bones. I think the idea behind this was good, the stuffing should pull some of the flavor out of the pork as well as get some color on top. For us, this didn’t pan out that well. We had forgotten to buy any stuffing and used what we had on hand. It was some kind of corn bread mix but I wasn’t really happy with the texture of it. I prefer large bread chunks and this was more like large crumbs. It sort of solidified and dried out and remained grainy and dry. I would try to do it again.
I also baked some rolls from my Artisan Baking book. I made a really simple whole wheat roll that turned out great. The whole book is great and these were perfect. They were hearty and light at the same time and had a good flavor even though you make the dough and bake it in one day.
One of the key ‘secrets’ to cooking meat is letting it rest when it comes out of the oven. Turkeys, chickens, pork, steak.. all meat needs a rest when it’s done cooking. For a hunk as large as the pork it takes about 30 minutes. This is the perfect time to toss all your sides into the oven to warm up and brown on top. I don’t cook meat based on time. Meat doneness is based solely on temperature and one of the first things I do is stick a probe thermometer into the thickest part of the meat. I use the kind that you leave in and meat while it cooks and you leave the digital read out on the counter. When the meat is within 4-5 degrees of it’s final doneness I pull it from the oven and cover it loosely wither either a lid or some tin foil. The meat’s temp will continue to rise for about 20 minutes and will hit the final cooking temp. If you pull the meat from the oven when the temp on the readout says it’s done you have over cooked it. Once the temp starts to drop again the meat is ready for cutting and has rested long enough.
The meal was a huge success and we plan to try and do it once a month going forward so keep your eyes peeled for an on going series. Everything turned out great and everyone was very happy with the meal. I firmly believe that most people have never had properly cooked meat at home. I think people eat out because they can’t seem to cook meat that is juicy when it gets to the table. When you bring a little science into things (usually in the form of a thermometer) you will get much better results and it takes all the guess work out. You don’t have to hover around looking at something and poking it to try and guess doneness. When it beeps.. you’re ready!
The pork itself was a bit of a disappointment. The meat was very white and really lacked that porky goodness I was hoping for. There has been a trend happening for the past 50 years that people are basically afraid of animal fats. People seem happy enough to eat bacon and sausage buy they insist on this overly white pork that lacks any fat and by extension flavor. Back before World War II people bred pigs as much for the fat as for the meat. It was used for all sorts of things, both in and out of the kitchen but since then we have been breeding these low fat pigs. I’m not saying we need to go back to pig fat oil lamps but a bit of fat in the meat isn’t so bad. Think of a pork chop like a steak, people like that steak flavor… that flavor is from the beef fat that is dispersed throughout the muscle. We need to grow pigs to offer the same kind of meat. Pork should be more redish then white. Sure, we all remember ‘the other white meat’ but who remembers eating really good pork? The pork was cooked well and wasn’t dry.. it just tasted of nothing. It was like chicken on a giant rib.
Even though we bought really great veg and meat this meal cost around $7.25 per person. Not bad I’d say and that doesn’t count the left overs. Truth be told we actually only ate 5 bones of pork. We never even cut into the other half! The only thing we could have used more of were the rolls. I should have doubled the recipe.
Topslakr
