PORK SHOULDER WITH APPLES
Most cooks cook apples in sweet preparations such as cobblers or pies. Here are some ideas—and fascinating history—of using apples in savory cooking. Read the story below, after the recipes.
RECIPE: Roast Pork Belly or Shoulder with Baked Apples
Adapted from “The Food of Spain,” Claudia Roden (HarperCollins, 2011). From the author: “With pork belly [or shoulder], the crisp crackling skin and layers of fat keep the meat meltingly succulent as it cooks. You can cut away the fat after it has cooked if you like.” Serves 6-8.
Ingredients
4 pounds pork belly or shoulder, superfluous fat removed, skin or rind still on
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
4 teaspoons sea or kosher salt
8 whole small apples (see note)
1 cup hard cider (or apple juice or cider)
Directions
If using a pork shoulder, have the butcher butterfly it so that it resembles a piece of belly (or a thick, open book). Put the pork on a rack in a roasting pan (if you don’t have a rack, grease the pan with 1 tablespoon olive oil). Sprinkle one side of the pork with 2 teaspoons salt, rubbing it into any cuts or tears, especially if in the rind. Repeat with another 2 teaspoons on the other side. Let the salt “work” on the meat for 10 minutes.
Shake off any excess salt, wipe the rind or skin side with paper towels and rub 1 tablespoon olive oil into both sides. Turn the pork rind side up.
For additional flavor, you also may brown both sides of the meat in a large skillet before the next step. No need for additional oil; some of the exterior fat will render and aid in browning.
Roast in a preheated 425-degree oven for 30 minutes, until the rind has started to puff up. Reduce the heat to 375 degrees and cook for about 2 hours, until the crackling is crisp and brown. You may baste the meat, and turn it over, 2-3 times during this stage, if you like.
Meanwhile, put the apples in a baking dish that holds them all snuggly and pour the hard cider (or juice or cider) into the bottom. When you have lowered the oven heat, place the dish of apples on the rack below the roast and cook until the apples are tender when pierced with a knife. The time depends on the apples’ size and degree of ripeness. Start checking them after 40 minutes. Remove the apples when they are done and set aside. Later, return the apples to the oven when the pork is almost done; heat them through.
Alternatively, about 10 minutes before the pork is finished with the oven, carefully lift and position the apples into the roasting pan with the pork. The whole preparation, thus arranged, makes for a comely presentation.
Let the pork rest for 15 minutes, covered with foil, before cutting or ripping it into thick slices or chunks.
Note: Roden suggests Golden Delicious apples “as a substitute for Reinetas,” the apples of Asturias, the region in northern Spain from which this recipe originates. For this preparation, other worthy varieties available in Colorado include smallish Jonagold, Gala or McIntosh.
A classic from many places: pork chops layered and cooked with apples.
RECIPE: Pork Chops with Apples in Cider Sauce
From “The Foods and Wines of Spain,” Penelope Casas (Knopf, 2009). From the author: “Hard cider, produced in Asturias (in northern Spain), enters into many recipes of the region. Accompanied by apples, it is particularly complementary to this pork dish.” Serves 4.
Ingredients
4 loin chops, about 3/4- to 1-inch thick
Salt
Flour for dusting
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 pound apples, peeled, cored and sliced about 1/2-inch thick
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 cup hard cider (or apple juice or cider)
Freshly ground pepper
Directions
Season the chops with the salt, then dust with the flour. Heat the oil and butter in a large skillet. Lightly brown the chops on both sides. Remove to a warm platter. Add the apple slices to the pan and sauté in the remaining oil, turning once, for 1 minute.
In an ovenproof casserole or loaf pan, arrange half the apple slices, the chops on top, then the remaining apples. To the skillet add the broth, cider, salt and pepper. Boil 3 minutes, then pour the liquid over the chops in the casserole. Cover tightly and bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes, or until the chops are cooked and tender.
Serve with boiled new potatoes, a green salad and a hard, very dry cider, if available. Otherwise, a light red wine is appropriate.
STORY:
Close to 8,000 varieties of apples grow in orchards around the globe. Of the six major global stone and tree fruits (excluding citrus)—peach, apricot, plum, cherry, pear and apple—apples are by far the most diffuse and prolific.
Yet, in this country, cooks pretty much limit their apple purchases to five types of apples: Gala, Red Delicious, Fuji, Honeycrisp and Granny Smith, in order of popularity.
Furthermore, we tend to cook apples only in sweet ways, as desserts such as apple pie, apple crisp or apple fritters, or we eat and drink them “sweetly,” as applesauce or apple cider.
A very unscientific survey of the indices in both my American- and foreign-published cookbooks shows that sweet preparations of apples outnumber savory ones by at least five to one.
Nonetheless, looked at historically, savory preparations using apples long pre-date—in truth, prefigure—sweet recipes. One of the oldest recipes in the Western canon, from Apicius (also known as “de re culinaria,” a collection of recipes dating to the 400s) is for a ragout of pork with “Matian apples”—the title of the recipe is “minutal matianum”—using a varietal name of the apple grower, Matian, a friend of Julius Caesar, as we might say “pork with Granny Smith apples” if we wished to invoke the hybridizer and namer of that apple, a “Mrs. Smith,” a grandmother, from New South Wales, Australia, who launched Granny Smiths out to the globe in 1868.
The ancient Romans and those living in Europe into the Middle Ages treated (furthermore, named) the apple as a “vegetable,” cooking it alongside various meats, especially pork and game, or serving cooked and oft-elaborately-spiced apples as its own course, alongside cooked root and green vegetables.
Apples were a favored stuffing for many meats, their native acidity serving as a foil to meats’ richness and fat. You will find such recipes up to modern times in all manner of cookbooks. In truth, one of the most common of savory pork preparations is “pork chops with apples,” a recipe with countless turns from countless kitchens, most of them North American.
Apple Facts
- As a plant, apples are a member of the rose family.
- The crabapple is the only apple native to North America.
- Apple varieties range in size from a little larger than a cherry to as large as a grapefruit.
- The largest apple ever picked weighed three pounds.
- It takes the energy from 50 leaves to produce one apple.
- Apples are one-quarter air. That's why they bob.
- Some, but few, apple trees live to be 100 years old.
- Two-thirds of the fiber and many antioxidants are found in the peel of an apple.
- Apples are the second most valuable fruit grown in the United States. Oranges are first.
- Apples are grown in all 50 states, although because apple trees require cold each winter, warmer states such as Florida and Texas do not produce commercial crops.
- The globe's top apple producers are, in order, China, the United States, Poland, Italy and France- One of four apples harvested in the United States is exported.
Only 5-6 percent of apples eaten in this country come from other countries such as New Zealand and Chile.
- Depending on the total volume of the harvest, between 40-60 percent of each year's U.S. apple crop is processed into apple juice and cider, applesauce, apple butter, dried apples and other apple-derived foods such as baby food or apple cider vinegar.
- Washington State is by far the largest producing state in the country. It grows over half of all U.S. apples.
- In 2020, the Gala apple took the top spot of favored apple variety from Red Delicious, with 46 million bushels produced (about 20% of the total U.S. crop).
- The top five apple varieties grown in the U.S. are, in order: Gala, Red Delicious, Fuji, Honeycrisp and Granny Smith.
- The most ascendant variety of apple in the U.S. is Cripps Pink (also known as Pink Lady).
The Mysterious Apple
Is there a more desirous, yet distant-seeming and mystery-laden, fruit than the apple?
Cut it along its “equator” and you’ll see a pentagram, a form used by ancient magicians to cast spells. (Cut it downward at its poles into equal halves and are there present two images of the female reproductive tract?)
We have the apple and Eve and The Garden of Eden; the apple and Snow White and her Witch. Merlin sat beneath an apple tree to teach. The gods of Valhalla are made immortal by eating only apples.
Mistletoe grows on apple trees. Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry sings—hauntingly, woozily—of “Avalon” (“the fields of apples”) that cured King Arthur of legend.
November First may be All Saints’ Day for Christians and Día de Muertos for Mexican folk, but it was the first day of the New Year for the ancient Celts. The preceding night was called “Samhain” (what later became “All Hallows Eve” or “Halloween”), on which night the Druids cut down mistletoe from the apple trees and sanctified the fruit that had borne it.