Slow Roast Pork Shoulder

Ingredients

• 2 kg higher-welfare shoulder of pork, bone-in, skin on
• sea salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 2 red onions, halved
• 2 carrots, peeled and halved lengthways
• 2 sticks celery, halved
• 1 bulb garlic, skin on, broken into cloves
• 6-8 bay leaves
• 600 ml water or organic vegetable stock

Method

This is a proper old-school Sunday roast with crackling. Leaving the bone in adds a bit of extra flavour and having a layer of fat helps to keep the meat nice and moist as it roasts. This isn't the kind of joint you carve into neat slices. If you've cooked it right, it should pull apart into shreds with a couple of forks. If you're worried about scoring the crackling yourself, ask your butcher to do it for you, that's what he's there for.

Preheat your oven to 220°C/425°F/gas 7.

Place your pork on a clean work surface, skin-side up. Get yourself a small sharp knife and make scores about a centimetre apart through the skin into the fat, but not so deep that you cut into the meat. If the joint is tied, try not to cut through the string. Rub salt right into all the scores you've just made, pulling the skin apart a little if you need to.

Brush any excess salt off the surface then turn it over. Season the underside of the meat with a few pinches of salt and pepper. Place your pork, skin-side up, in a roasting tray and pop in the preheated oven. Roast for 30 minutes, until the skin of the pork has started to puff up and you can see it turning into crackling. At this point, turn the heat down to 170°C/325°F/gas 3, cover the pork snugly with a double layer of tinfoil, pop back in the oven and roast for a further 4 and a half hours.

Take out of the oven, take the foil off, and baste the meat with the fat in the bottom of the tray. Carefully lift the pork up and transfer to a chopping board. Spoon all but a couple of tablespoons of fat out (save it for roast potatoes!).

Add all the veg, garlic and bay leaves to the tray and stir them into the fat. Place the pork back on top of everything and return to the stove without the foil to roast for another hour. By this time the meat should be meltingly soft and tender.

Carefully move the meat to a serving dish, cover again with tinfoil and leave to rest while you make your gravy. Spoon away any fat in the tray, then add the water or stock and place the tray on the hob. Bring to the boil and simmer for a few minutes, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon to scrape up all those lovely sticky tasty bits on the bottom of the tray. When you've got a nice, dark gravy, pour it through a sieve into a bowl or gravy boat, using your spoon to really push all the goodness of the veg through the sieve. Add a little more salt and pepper if it needs it.

Serve the pork and crackling with your jug of gravy and some lovely roast potatoes (As a treat, you can try roasting them in the fat you spooned out of your roasting tray. Some stewed red cabbage and a dollop of apple sauce will finish this off perfectly.)

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pork-recipes/6-hour-slow-roasted-pork-shoulder

Beef Roast

Ingredients

Beef roast

2 potatoes

2 carrots

Thyme 4 sprigs

Rosemary 2 sprigs

Sea salt 

Pepper

Olive oil

Low sodium Chicken stock

Bulb of garlic

Pack of sliced mushrooms

Preheat oven to 375F. Sautée the mushrooms in olive oil until cooked. While the mushrooms are cooking prepared the roast. Separate garlic bulb into cloves. No need to peel. Just remove any loose debris. Wash and cut potatoes and carrots. Rinse and pat dry herbs. Rinse and pat dry beef roast. Put roast in center of cast iron pan with vegetables,  2 sprigs of thyme and 2 sprigs of rosemary and garlic around. Season contents in pan with salt, pepper and drizzle olive oil over everything. Toss ingredients so they are coated with olive oil. Place herbs under roast. Pour some chicken stock over everything. Put pan in oven for 30 min to brown roast. Flip roast half-way brown other side. Reduce heat to 225F and  take roast out of oven. Put the remaining thyme on top of roast cover roast with mushrooms and add rest of mushrooms around the roast, baste the roast with pan juices, put pan back in oven and cook for 2.5 hours. Roast comes out well done.

Notes: when I made the roast I made it for lunch but because we didn't get to it until late, I kept it warm in the oven. The salt I used was Portuguese rock salt I got as a wedding favor. If you prefer your roast on the medium side I would think that you could just pull the roast out earlier and leave the vegetables in the oven to cook until tender. I was pretty generous with the olive oil. I covered the roast with mushrooms, with the idea that it would keep the roast from drying out on the top.