Since the mere reading of the recipe made my stomach grumble with longing, we decided to make the pork shoulder for three consecutive Rambling Restaurant suppers. After a day’s worth of roasting, you pry apart the brittle outer shell of crackling and dig through a shuddering layer of burning hot pork fat to find the most perfect, tender, juicy, falls-apart-with-the-tug-of-a-fork meat. Shredded with two dueling forks and bathed in an impromptu soy-hoisin-chili-garlic-leftover spring roll dipping sauce mixture, we had guests raving that it was the best pulled pork they’d ever tasted.  And so I recreated it for my family back home in Boston, introducing them to the joy that is garlic and spice-rubbed, high heat-blasted pig skin.  Here’s the recipe so you can do it yourself, very very slightly adapted from Hugh F-W’s recipe in ingredients and time, should you decide at lunch that pork shoulder is essential for dinner, without quite enough time to ‘fuhgeddaboutit.’

Ridiculously Delicious Roast Pork Shoulder With Crackling

What You Need:

A large hunk of pork shoulder with skin – mine was about 8 pounds and fed 8 people
Five cloves of smashed garlic
A thumbsize piece of peeled ginger, if you had impressively large thumbs
1 tbsp chili flakes
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tbsp Chinese five-spice
4 tbsp salt
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tsp white pepper
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 tbsp soy sauce

Also helpful if you want gravy:

Stock (in a perfect and happy world,  freshly homemade from the carcass of the ever-giving Samson the Turkey of the previous day’s Thanksgiving extravaganza)
A few shakes of flour
Soy sauce
Red Wine
Chili Sauce

What You Do:

1. Take a very sharp knife and score the pork skin into parallel lines about a centimeter apart, which means attempting the slightly awkward process of cutting into the skin deep enough to reach the fat but not so deep to cut into the meat. It feels sort of wrong,  but it will make you happy in about six hours when you have crackling in hand.

2. Dice the garlic and ginger and mix with the spices and liquids to form a chunky paste. I did this by hand, but even better if you’ve got a mortar and pestle.

3. Give the skin side of the pork a nice deep tissue massage with half of the tasty paste, then place it skin-side up on a rack in a roasting tray. Then you can make tasty gravy with the meat juices below.  Blast the meat for half an hour at 450º.

4. After what Hugh F-W calls the ‘half-hour sizzle’, grab a pair of oven mitts and flip over the shoulder. If you have the ability, it is particularly amusing to make your little sister stand by the oven holding the scorchingly hot hunk of heavy meat while you do something, I can’t remember what. Once you allow her to put the meat back in the tray upside down, rub the other side with the rest of the, um, rub.  In case you have no common sense, I will remind you not to do this with your bare hands and to use a wooden spoon instead.

5.   Pour a glass of water into the roasting tray, bring the temperature down to 300º and leave the meat to slowly increase in tastiness for about six hours. Adjust temperature accordingly depending on how much time you have – Hugh F-W does 16-24 hours at 110º, I increased the heat because I only had 6 hours instead of overnight. If you’re not sure, just make sure the internal temp is at least 165º before pulling the shoulder from the oven. Regardless of cooking time, flip and baste the meat halfway through.

6. About 45 minutes before you’re ready to eat, turn  the heat back up to 450º to get your crackling all crispety crunchety.

7.  When the meat is done and cooling, you can make a quick and meaty gravy by heating some of the pork fat from the roasting tray and whisking with a few shakes of flour to make a roux. Then pour in the rest of the pan drippings, stock, some soy sauce, a bit of chili sauce, some red wine, whatever you’ve got around that tastes good.  The sauce will thicken and become awesome.

8. Eat pork, audaciously bathed in prodigious amounts of spicy, meaty sauce. Allow to melt into mouth. Crunch into a few happy little strips of crackling. Serve, if at all possible, with leftover stuffing/mashed potatoes/cheddar and scallion scones/homemade bread and finish off with leftover pie. Feed (and impress) your whole family with pork and happiness. Oh, how I love the holidays…

Thursday’s Rambling Restaurant was a boozy festival of wine tasting and matching canapes  – so many glasses of alcohol that I’m amazed I could stand up straight long enough to take any of these photos. We partnered with the lovely and charming Dan of Bibendum Wines to do a casual and relaxed evening event in our usual secret location. Dan ‘liberated’ a serious stock of bottles from the Bibendum stores for us – Champagne, Riesling, Chardonnay, Malbec, Chianti, and an excellent dessert wine – all matched with bite-size hor d’oeuvres such as the Zamorano cheese with quince jelly and persimmon, above. Below, tasting notes with parmesan crisps awaiting their toppings for the first round of canapes.

The full line-up of booze and bites below…

Dan started us off with a delightfully fizzy champagne and Chef foodrambler baked some golden parmesan biscuits  topped with caramelized red onion chutney and a sliver of orange zest:

Bruno Paillard Brut Premiere Cuvee NV: A wonderful, elegant Champagne with delicate freshly baked bread and citrus aromas. The palate is crisp, fresh and complex with grapefruit, lime and subtle red berry fruit.

We then moved on to two white wines, served with the Spanish cheese canape at the top and a round of mini Vietnamese summer rolls:

Riesling Kabinett Rheingau Prinz von Hessen 2008: Every drop of this explodes with citrus fireworks & mineral verve. Luscious mouthfuls of lemon ice, freshly cut green apples & delicate quince. Fruity, but not sweet; refreshing, but not tart.

Laroche Punto Alto Chardonnay 2008: Elegant aromas of lime, white peach and melon. Crisp, fresh acidity underlying a rich but classy palate bursting with citrus and green apple fruit.

Moving on to the red wines, Chef foodrambler had baked a tray of fabulous beef empanadas according to Michelle’s mother’s traditional Argentine recipe as a perfect local accompaniment to an excellent and very affordable Malbec:

Argento Malbec Tempranillo 2009:This exquisite blend of Malbec and Tempranillo is intense red in colour with deep indigo hues. Enticing aromas of red cherries and fresh violets accompany flavours of ripe plum and chocolate with subtle smoky notes. The finish is persistent with sweet tannins and balanced acidity.

I spent a week in Buenos Aires about 7 years ago during my semester in Santiago, Chile. I spent a laughable amount of that week on the hunt for the best empanadas in the city (asking cab drivers and strangers on the street for their opinion and eventually purchasing so many empanadas that we resorted to trying to give them away to people at the airport who mostly gave us bizarre looks and turned away)  so I feel fairly qualified to say that these empanadas were fantastic.

The second red wine was a bolder and more complex Chianti, so foodrambler devised a black pudding/pea puree/crispy bacon bite of intense meaty flavor as a counterpoint:

Campomaggio Chianti Classico 2005: Smooth, ripe Chianti Classico in a modern style; juicy black cherries, blackberries, cinnamon spice, vanilla and chocolate abound. The ripe, bold tannins and crisp Sangiovese acidity add the all important backbone.

I loved all the bursts of color throughout the meal – the warm sunshine brightness of the persimmon against the dark ruby hues of the quince jelly, the fresh green grass feeling exuding from the pea puree next to the meaty red slivers of streaky bacon.  I also love this photo, which captures the essence of the pork celebration occuring that night: a pan of bacon, a pan of black pudding, and a tray of slow-roasted pork shoulder about to be whacked back in the oven to toast up some crackling.

This pork shoulder, roasting in the oven for about nine hours, was reprised from the previous evening due to popular demand.  Even after sending out 22 plates of the pork, pulled and drenched with a soy-hoisin-chili-roast-drippings gravy, we had so much leftover that I went around with a overflowing plate o’meat and offered seconds to everyone to absolute rave reviews. Honestly, you can’t ever go wrong with a good piece of meat in the oven for hours and hours to cook in its own fat. Mmmm…

The meal ended with a beautifully rich tarte tatin, sort of like an upside-down caramelized apple pie, and a scoop of homemade vanilla bean ice cream. As always, we got so caught up in plating and snacking on the dessert that I didn’t take any pictures, but trust me, it was fabulous. The caramelly sweetness of the apples matched the deliciously complex dessert wine to perfection:

Els Pyreneus Rivesaltes Ambre NV (solera aged):Rich, golden hue, with a nose of honey, roast coffee, apricots and hazelnuts. Beautifully balanced palate bursting with candied fruit and brioche flavours.

Six wines down (not to mention the bottles we broke open to sip on behind the scenes during the cooking) and it was all a wrap, folks.  Add in seven different dishes and it was quite an evening to remember. Thankfully the photographic evidence helps with the resulting fuzziness of the brain…

Tonight’s been a primarily solo affair (with Chris’s help on the awkward pouring-brine-into-a-plastic-bag-full-of-raw-turkey action), but luckily the Rambling Restaurants are always fun shared cooking evenings  full of laughter, chatter, catchup on recent nightly activities, dirty jokes, a broken glass or two (or three) and ample glasses of wine to fuel the cooking creativity. Over the last few nights, Chef foodrambler, Michelle, our newest member Sarah and I have served nine different dishes to over forty people. I’ll start with Wednesday’s meal, a classic and relaxing Rambling Restaurant event compared to the hustle and bustle of the next evening’s wine tasting.

Wednesday we served vegetarian Vietnamese summer rolls as a starter – lightly sauced cellophane noodles and an assortment of fresh veggies (carrots, scallions, cucumber, water chestnuts, cilantro) rolled tight in thin rice paper wrappers.  After dipping my fingers in hot water to soften about forty pancakes from their original hardened state, I had some crazyass prune fingers, let me tell you.

Dipped into a sauce of fish sauce, vinegar, sugar, soy, garlic, scallions, chili and whatever else I put in that I can’t remember,  these bright little bites of freshness are a very happy way to start any meal. But it doesn’t get much better when it’s followed by an insanely good slow-roasted pork shoulder  – rubbed with spices and then whacked into the oven for about nine hours till it falls apart at the poke of a fork into the tenderest shreds of meat.  Mmmmmmmm….way to go foodrambler.

Scored into about centimeter thick strips with a sharp knife, the outer skin becomes the most amazing fatty, crispy, crunchy crackling that is frighteningly addictive. Served on cabbage and egg noodles with a pour of meaty gravy, this dish is pretty much unstoppable. We ended Wednesday night with an apple crumble with cream and a sprinkling of bittersweet caramel dust.  Unfortunately,  I always forget to take pictures of dessert. But don’t worry, I’ve got loads of pictures of the FoodRambler’s amazing canape creations from Thursday, coming up next!

Oh and while I’m posting Rambling Restaurant photos…

We did a photoshoot a few weeks ago for a German food magazine that’s doing a feature on Rambling Restaurant! It was tons of fun dressing up and getting our pictures taken by a professional photographer while doing ridiculous things like picnicking on a rooftop…

More to come soon!