Recipe | Provencal Roast Pork Shoulder
This recipe will be written in the style of which the dish should be made — without precision. The entire recipe isn’t even needed at all, all you need to know is slow and low and throw some things in from the pantry. But if you lack the experience or confidence in the kitchen, I have more than enough for the both of us, so here is the long and easy process of a French style pulled pork.
Ingredients
- 1lb per person Pork Shoulder, also known as Boston Butt (best to make with 6+ lbs, leave fat on)
- 2–3 tablespoons Herbs de Provence (or a mixture of dried thyme, rosemary, oregano, whatever)
- 1/4 cup Whole Grain Mustard
- 1/3 cup Apple Cider Vinegar
- Salt, Pepper & Olive Oil
- 1 large dutch oven (cast iron pot with lid like a Le Creuset), but also one of those flimsy disposable aluminum serving trays will work, using tin foil for a lid).
- If you have some chicken, beef or veggie stock, I’ll take that too
Directions
Coat the meat with the herbs salt and pepper and let sit at room temperature (in a covered area out of direct sunlight) for 1 hour if you can. This is a joint purpose for letting the herbs sink in and and for the meat to warm up. Don’t be frightened, this is a lesson you want to adopt for ALL of your meat cooking, up to 2 hours for beef, 1 for pork chicken and fish. Hot pan and cold meat do all kinds of damage to tenderness and even cooking.
Preheat oven to 300 degrees, then pour in the vinegar to the bottom of the pan with some stock if you have it. It’s ok if you splash a little on the meat, but you don’t want all the toppings you just put on getting rubbed off. Cover and put in oven. This is what it might look like:
Cook for one hour at 300 degrees, then lower the temperature to 200 degrees and cook for another 4–5 hours, basting hourly. If possible you want to refrigerate overnight and cook an additional 1–2 hours the next day, but if you don’t have the time, add an hour now. Regardless of what I say, do what the meat says, the meat is done when you can pull out a taste with a spoon, or with your fingers.
If you are able to refrigerate overnight, it’s the easiest way to discard the fat as you’ll see in this picture — it’s like an frozen over lake. The rest of the liquid is gelatinous because of the molecular make up of meat. This whole paragraph might gross people out but this is all very normal and natural. And remember, cooking in fat is not the same as eating fat, so get rid of it at the end of cooking, not before, but also don’t let some foodie hipster convince you to eat it.
Once you’re done cooking, you want to take the meat onto a cutting board (discard the liquid) and use two forks in opposition to shred the meat. Or cut the meat into six hunks and let your dinner guests do the work (but maybe comb through that hunk because there could be some bigger bits of fat or grizzle depending on how good your butcher is). If you fully shred as pictured below, you can put some of the cooking liquid back into the mixture and keep warm.
Serving suggestions for this particular dish would echo food of the French countryside — garlic & herb roasted potatoes and green beans. But you could also make it of the American South, and throw it on a sweet roll with pickled onions and a bit of BBQ sauce (a bit! you didn’t cook all day to mask that flavor) with a side of coleslaw.
