CAST IRON SLOW COOKED PORK
Read the helpful hints on cooking with a cast iron Dutch oven—especially outdoors—after the recipe.
Photo from Lid Lifter at everydaydutchoven.com
RECIPE: Fall Apart Tender Slow Roasted Pork
From “Lid Lifter” at everydaydutchoven.com
Ingredients
1 pork butt roast (3-4 lbs.)
1/4 to 1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup apple juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
Directions
Lightly oil or spray Dutch oven. Place pork in large bowl. Sprinkle the roast on all sides with Worcestershire sauce. Press brown sugar into pork, coating all sides evenly.
Carefully place in prepared Dutch oven. Pour apple juice around pork roast, being sure not to drizzle it on crusted meat. Roast at 300 degrees for 3-3 1/2 hours, replenishing coals hourly.
Pull the meat apart. Stir the salt into the juices remaining in Dutch oven. Serve.
At the site everydaydutchoven.com, the blogger who goes by (pun alert) the handle “Lid Lifter,” is both quite knowledgeable about and taken by the manifold uses of cast iron Dutch ovens. He—I am guessing LL is “he” because of the site’s home page art—uses his both inside and outside his home kitchen, which is a good reminder to us all not only about the Dutch oven’s versatility, but also a goad to remember to use it more often, especially in-house and both on the stove as well as in our larger oven(s).
Lid Lifter takes a recipe for slow-cooked pork shoulder from one of his favorite cookbook authors, Shirley Corriher, who makes the recipe in her Dutch oven. Lid Lifter moves the recipe outside, however, and shows how deliciousness is eminently possible on camping and backpacking trips as much as at the home address’s dining table.
This recipe directs “Roast at 300 degrees . . .” And how, you well might ask, do you figure that in the great outdoors? Here is Lid Lifter’s advice on tending the fire, achieving, I assume, the desired 300-degree temperature: “There are several methods of coal placement under and above your oven. The basic rule of thumb is to take the diameter of your oven, multiply it by two to derive at the total number of coals needed then subtract either two or three from the bottom and add them to the top.”
Lid Lifter uses slightly more, but goes on: “I cooked a 3-pound roast in my 12-inch Dutch oven with 10 coals in a ring around the bottom and 16-18 in a ring around the outside of the lid with 4-6 spaced evenly in the middle. I changed the coals three times, cooking the roast for a total of 3 1/2 hours.”
The nice thing about Dutch ovens is that their iron is of one weave, so to speak, with nothing but metal all around, over and above, whatever’s cooking in them. So hot coals on their noggins is a no-never-mind.
Wine Pairings and why: We don’t realize how much salt we eat in everyday foods. Bread and rolls, for example, are America’s saltiest foods, twice saltier than potato chips says the Center for Disease Control. (Keep that in mind when you make sandwiches with this dish.) Likewise, we eat a lot of sugars even while we believe otherwise. This isn’t a “hunk of pork” dish; it’s meat with sweet. Check out that brown sugar and apple juice. Always pair sweet foods with wines that are either as sweet by the same measure, or that give the impression of sweetness, as do rich, fruity reds such as Grenache. A bit of tannin helps here, too, as a foil for fat. You’ll get that in many a Sangiovese-based red wine from Italy.