The Pork

So the meat went in the oven at about 830 this morning at 250. I put it on a rack in a roasting pan, closed the door and went away. At about 1030, I basted the top of the roast with apple juice using a pastry brush. It would have been better if I had some dipping sauce (keep reading) to baste with, but hadn't yet made it.

At that point Z and I went to run some errands - Home Depot and Woodmans. We got home around 2, more apple juice. Then I some dipping sauce - (melt butter in a small sauce pan, about 1/2 as much mustard and a similar amount of molasses, a good dose of rub, a lot but not too much salt and then about 4 times the volume of apple cider vinegar (there is a better way that I will write down in another post). Bring to a boil (careful not to boil over).

From here on baste with the sauce. I went out again or I would have basted more. It also would have been good to turn the meat over around this time, but I had inserted a meat thermometer already...

By about 430p the internal temp of the meat was above 185 and I took it out of the oven to cool a bit. At about 5 I used two forks to shred the roast. It pulled pretty well and the bone came out pretty easily. Probably could have stayed in a bit longer. Maybe next time I will do it at about 225 degrees...

I poured out the grease from the pan and deglazed mostly with apple juice. I also used a bit of the dipping sauce (kind of a mistake as the vinegar was a bit much). I also added a bit of bbq sauce I had in the fridge that was based on the dipping sauce (I really couldn't write down how to do it again).

It was good.

Dry Rub - 1 Dec 2007

Here in Wisconsin, it is sleeting on top of about 2 inches of snow outside, but I am thinking about pulled pork. Even without the weather, my patience for tending a fire for the time necessary to smoke a pork-butt-roast is lacking. So my plan is to stick the thing in the oven at about 250 early tomorrow and forget about it for a significant number of hours.

But before I do that I need to marinate it (and thaw it, but that is another story) and to do that I needed to prepare another batch of dry rub. Now the rub with this post is that my intention is to not give recipes in this project; perhaps this post will be the exception that proves the rule...

My rubs thus far have had many many ingredients. I decided this time to try to simplify. So here is a decent rub that is pretty simple, albeit not quite perfect:

1/2 cup each, salt, brown sugar, paprika
2T each, garlic powder, onion powder
1.5T cumin
1T each, black and white peper
1.5 t oregano
1t cinnamon

be sure to get the lumps out of the brown sugar (a sifter or strainer works well for that) and grind the whole spices up really well (I use a coffee grinder (that I don't use for coffee)).

Stay tuned for a report on the pork, but don't hold your breath lest I not actually get to reporting about it.