Rosted Pork Shoulder

By nordal

Ingredients

• 2 kg bone-in shoulder of pork, skin on
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 2 red onions, halved
• 2 carrots, peeled and halved lengthways
• 2 sticks of celery, halved
• 1 bulb of garlic, skin on, broken into cloves
• 6-8 fresh bay leaves
• 600 ml water or vegetable stock

Preparation

Step 1

This is a proper old-school Sunday roast with crackling. Leaving the bone in adds a bit of
extra flavour and having a layer of fat helps to keep the meat nice and moist as it roasts.
This isn’t the kind of joint you carve into neat slices. If you’ve cooked it right, it should
pull apart into shreds with a couple of forks. If you’re worried about scoring the crackling
yourself, ask your butcher to do it for you, that’s what he’s there for.

Preheat your oven to 220°C/425°F/gas 7.
Place your pork on a clean work surface, skin-side up. Get yourself a small sharp knife
and make scores about a centimetre apart through the skin into the fat, but not so deep
that you cut into the meat. If the joint is tied, try not to cut through the string. Rub salt
right into all the scores you’ve just made, pulling the skin apart a little if you need to.

Brush any excess salt off the surface then turn it over. Season the underside of the meat
with a few pinches of salt and pepper. Place your pork, skin side-up, in a roasting tray
and pop in the preheated oven. Roast for 30 minutes, until the skin of the pork has started
to puff up and you can see it turning into crackling. At this point, turn the heat down to
170°C/325 F/gas3, cover the pork snugly with a double layer of tin foil, pop back in the
oven and roast for a further 4 and a half hours.

Take out of the oven take the foil off, and baste the meat with the fat in the bottom of the
tray. Carefully lift the pork up and transfer to a chopping board. Spoon all but a couple of
tablespoons of fat out (save it for roast potatoes!)

Add all the veg, garlic and bay leaves to the tray and stir them into the fat. Place the pork
back on top of everything and return to the ove sithout the foil to roast for another hour.
By this time the meat should be meltingly soft and tender.

Carefully move the meat to a serving dish, cover again with tin foil and leave to rest
while you make your gravy. Spoon away any fat in the tray, then add the water or stock
and place the tray on the hob. Bring to the boil and simmer for a few minutes, stirring
constantly with a wooden spoon to scrape up all those lovely sticky tasty bits on the

bottom of the tray. When you’ve got a nice, dark gravy,pour it through a sieve into a bowl
or gravy boat, using your spoon to really push all the goodness of the veg through the
sieve. Add a little more salt and pepper if it needs it.

Serve the pork and crackling with your jug of gravy and some lovely roast potatoes (As a
treat you can try roasting them in the fat you spooned out of your roasting tray. Some
stewed red cabbage and a dollop of apple sauce will finish this off perfectly).