Low & Slow Cooked Pork Roast
A the low and slow method requires time, but will fill your house with the aroma of roasting pork all day and the results are amazing.
A pork shoulder roast is a tough cut of meat. Think about how much work your own shoulder goes through in the course of a day. It’s the same with a hog. The pork shoulder comes from the upper front legs of the animal and it gets a daily work out. So, there are really only two ways to cook it, both of which ensure that the tough muscle fibers are broken down and the fat renders through the meat to tenderize it. One is to braise it and most of my pork roast recipes are just that: cooking the roast in an enclosed environment with small amount of liquid. This ensures the steam circulated around the meat with the hot liquid, providing more thermal contact than if it were simply hot air. The second method is, in fact, with hot air; but for a long period of time. This is the method that barbecue employs with hot, circulating smoke. It isn’t uncommon to barbecue a 10 pound pork shoulder for 12-15 hours. Generally, barbecuing is done at something around 215°-225°F. just above the boiling point.
A roast cooking at 225 degrees will require 75 to 90 minutes per pound. Depending on how large your pork roast is, you may or may not have that kind of time. At 300°F, the cooking time will amount to about 65 minutes per pound and since I had an 8 pound roast on this occasion, that is the temperature I chose, which took 8-1/2 hours. The results in either at these temperatures will be more or less the same, but if you go with any temperature higher than that, the meat will cook too quickly but it won’t become tenderized. I believe that anything less than an hour per pound will yield poor results.
In any case, the final step of this recipe is to ramp up the oven to a very high temperature, exposing the fat side of the roast to the heat necessary to crisp it up before serving, about twenty minutes. This final application of high heat means you can forego the messy first step found in many pork roast recipes (including most of mine) of browning the roast on all sides on the stove top before putting it in the roasting pan.
Low & Slow Cooked Pork Roast
Ingredients
- 7-8 pound bone-in pork shoulder roast
- 4 tbsp Dijon mustard
- 4 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 2 tbsp white wine
- 4 tbsp Herbs de Provence
- 2 tbsp Onion and Herb Seasoning Blend (like, Mrs. Dash)
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 1 cup baby carrots, cut in half
- 1 medium yellow onion, rough cut into wedges
- 3-4 stalks celery, cut into 1-2 inch pieces
- 1 cup beef stock (like, Kitchen Basics or Swanson's)
- 1 cup white wine
- non-stick cooking spray (like, Pam)
- 1/8 tsp fine sea salt
- 10-12 grinds freshly cracked black pepper
Instructions
- Take the pork butt out of the refrigerator for two hours before cooking.
- Pre-heat the oven to 300°F.
- Score the fat side of the roast in diamond shapes, cutting only into the fat cap, not the meat.
- Combine the Dijon mustard, vinegar, wine, Herbs de Provence, Mrs. Dash seasoning and the olive oil to form a thick rubbing sauce. Slather this all over the roast, on all sides, leaving the fat cap right side up, and do this as the roast is coming up to room temperature, which will give the meat a couple of hours to soak in the flavors. Salt and pepper the roast liberally after applying the sauce.
- Use a large roasting pan that will be deep enough to contain your roast but give you clearance to seal it with aluminum foil. Cut up your vegetables and after spraying the pan with non-stick cooking spray, lay them in a single layer in the center of the pan.
- Place the roast on top of the veggies and then pour the beef stock and wine around the roast. Cap the roasting pan tightly with aluminum foil and set in the middle of your oven.
- Roast the meat for 65 minutes per pound; if you use a meat thermometer, roast to an internal temperature of 165°F.
- Remove the roasting pan from the oven and leave it tented with the foil, then raise the temperature in your oven to 450°F.
- Remove the foil and place the roast back in the oven for 20-25 minutes to crisp up what's left of the fat cap.
- Take the roast out of the roasting pan and tent it with the aluminum foil for 15 minutes before carving.
- Use the pan dripping with the veggies as gravy as-is, or you can use a submersion blender to smooth it out. Either way, it's great on mashed potatoes.