Shoulder of Pork

This is an old fashioned pork dinner. Roasting the shoulder for five and a half hours leaves you with meat that you don’t really need to carve with a knife. Instead, you could take a couple of forks and pull the meat apart.

I picked up a 2 kilogram shoulder, with bone, from The Queen Vic Market and asked the butcher to score it for me.

Method
Preheat the oven up high.

Gently rub some oil over the skin. Then rub salt over.
Turn the meat over and sprinkle salt and pepper on the underside.

• Put the shoulder, skin side-up, in a roasting dish and pop in the oven for 30 minutes, until the skin starts to puff up and you can see it turning into crackling.
• Take out the roasting dish. Turn the heat down, cover the meat with a layer of tin foil, pop back in the oven and roast for another four hours.
• Take the roasting dish from the oven again. Baste the meat and transfer to a large plate.
• Pour off the fat from the dish leaving just a couple of tablespoons behind.
• In the roasting dish add a handful of garlic cloves, still with skin, a sprig of fresh rosemary, a cup of vegetable stock and a cup of cider. Any cider will do.
• Place the pork back in the dish and return to the oven. Cook for another hour.

Carefully move the meat to a serving dish, cover again with foil and leave to rest.

Related Topics

Resting the Meat
Apple Sauce

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