While out at our favorite tap house last week, Ann and I met Taylor and Laura and invited them over for dinner. Laura has some really serious food allergies, so I wanted to plan a meal for her that would be a little bit special. While her allergy list is certainly daunting, I have faced much worse as a professional chef.
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| New Friends |
As fate would have it, while out shopping earlier in the week, Ann had found pork shoulders at a terrific price and brought home a pair of them. With Laura's diet restricted to mainly meat and vegetables, I thought that pulled pork would be a great anchor for dinner. I'm not a professional pit master, but I like to think that as a chef, I can make some decent pig even without a smoker.
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| Butt Rub |
The first step in making pulled pork is to make a decent rub for the pork. This rub adds seasoning but also helps create that really delicious bark on the outside of the meat. I have never been one for buying pre-mixed spices, preferring to make my own mixes to get just the flavor profile that I want. Also, because I have always dealt with a customer base with innumerable allergies, I like to know exactly what is in everything I make. Because I do not use a recipe, each batch is slightly different and I am OK with that. My home kitchen is not a commercial enterprise where consistency is imperative.
My all-purpose pork rub, which I call tongue-in-cheek Butt Rub, starts with sweet Hungarian paprika, salt, and crystallized sugar (not the stickier brown sugar found in so many recipes). Additional spice and heat comes from smoked paprika, Chimayo chile, cayenne pepper, black pepper, and ground mustard. Sweet spice, which lets me keep the sugar to a minimum, comes from allspice and nutmeg, ground at the moment of making the rub. Additional flavorings come from granulated garlic and a touch of cumin and Mexican oregano, ground to order.
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| Shoulders, Rubbed and Perched on a Bed of Onion Slices |
Because I don't have a smoker, I make my pork in the oven. I don't get the smoke, which I really miss, but I do get some really sexy onions. Decades ago, I watched a French chef roast a pork tenderloin on a bed of onions and was intrigued, so I followed suit. Habitually now, when I roast pork, I put it on a bed of onion slabs. After the onions have slow-cooked in the pork fat, they may be one of the sexiest foods you can put in your mouth!
Pork shoulder cooking technique is pretty similar in an oven as in a hot smoker, except I have more temperature control in the oven. I started the pork at 8:30am, uncovered, at 300F for an hour to start warming the pork through. After an hour, the internal temperature was around 75F and I turned the oven to 250F for another hour. At this point, the pork was smelling really good and I turned it down to 225F.
My usual technique is to cook the pork uncovered until it comes up to a safe temperature, about 155F. At this point, the bark is very pretty and dark, and I wrap the butts in film first, then foil, and return them to the oven to steam-roast at 225F until the internal temperature comes up to 200F. At 200F, the pork is done and will fall apart if you look at it slightly wrong! I want to say that it came up to 200F by about 4:00pm and I turned off the oven and let it stand, still wrapped, until we were ready to eat around 6:00pm.
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| Sexy Pork, Ready to Fall Apart |
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| Ready to Serve, No Forks Necessary! |
Because Laura has both dairy and gluten allergies, I am sure that her starch diet is pretty limited, perhaps to rice and potatoes, probably in the form of fries. I wanted to make her a dairy-free potato gratin as something special, using a technique that I learned a long, long time ago from a French chef. The dish starts by concentrating chicken stock flavored with shallots and fresh thyme to a syrup glaze. This stock will be the cooking liquid instead of the usual milk or cream.
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| Reducing Chicken Stock with Shallots and Thyme |
I make the gratin by thinly slicing skin-on yellow potatoes. I used a knife instead of a mandoline, but the tool you use to slice the potatoes does not matter. To build the gratin, I rub the gratin with olive oil, then put in a layer of potatoes and brush on a little of the flavored chicken stock reduction. A sprinkle of salt completes the layer and I continue in this fashion until the gratin is full. I bake it in a moderate oven, say 350F, covered under foil for 45 minutes to an hour to cook the potatoes. Then I uncover the dish and bake it on the top shelf until the liquid is evaporated and the top is nicely browned, say another 20 minutes. At the same time this weekend, I put in a sheet tray of asparagus to roast while the potatoes browned. When the potatoes were brown, we sat down to eat.
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| Gratin of Potatoes |
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| Roasted Asparagus |
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