I have posted on oven roasted pork shoulder in the past at least once (check out this pork shoulder roast post. It was one of my first posts so be kind…)  At the time,  I was cooking frantically. I was reading a ton about food and I was trying to learn as quickly as possible how to cook. It’s been a little over 4 years now. Constantly blogging about food has made the experience more rewarding and lasting for sure. Without it it would have been well… just ok, not as fun. Plus I got into the whole food photography thing which has been extremely enjoyable and gave me the opportunity to meet a ton of really cool people who share the same interest.  Anyways, roasted pork shoulder right? Tonight, I watched 2 movies while this thing cooked away in the oven. Yeah, it’s that hard. The movies were The Martian… watched it twice.

Had I had the time to brine this thing I would have. But I didn’t. Well, more like I didn’t want to. I wanted it all over with by midnight. Only one way to get there this fast (I’m sure there are tons of ways but it wouldn’t sound as cool). Inject a lot of salt and garlic into the muscle with a needle. Nothing new here, but I’ve never done it. It was fun and kinda worked but will definitely need some fine tuning. Brining, marinading or dry curing is the way to go but it could take a few days with a large piece of meat like this one and let’s not get into equilibrium brining. Injecting the brine into the meat will cut down the time dramatically but it won’t be as good. Salt and time do wonderful things to meat. Reduce time, reduce awesomeness. I could do without all the awesomeness tonight seriously though. I’ve been waiting to use this bad boy (the needle that is) for a long time and tonight is the night.  Here’s what went down:

Ingredients:

4-6 boneless pork shoulder.
1 cup of water
2-3 tsp salt
2 tsp minced garlic
4 tsp honey

Needle, please.

Place all the ingredients in a blender and yep…. you guessed it. Blend it on high speed for a minute or so. Get that needle ready.. Get that pork ready too. Rinse it in water if necessary. Place in a pot and inject the brine into it in as many places as possible to make sure the brine reaches into the meat as much as possible. This process will take a few minutes and parental discretion is advised as well as being careful not to puncture yourself with that thing. Remember, you’re dealing with raw pork, so always a good idea to be extra careful. If time allows it, let the pork rest overnight in the fridge. In my case, I didn’t want to wait so… Once you’re done injecting the whole brine into the pork you will realize that a lot of it is resting at the bottom of the pot. Well… speed-brining isn’t perfect, toss that excess brine away. Hopefully what remains inside the meat will be enough to flavor it. I should have made my brine a little sweeter and saltier. The beauty of messing up.

Roasting.

Stick the meat in the oven. I placed it in a cast iron dutch oven, but you could use a roasting pan or something similar. One thing about roasting this kind of meat is that the high content of fat makes it pretty safe to roast under a number of different conditions. It is almost guaranteed to turn out juicy and delicious. This time I roasted it on 375F for like 2 hours and then 3 more hours at 190F. The result was rosy and MEGA juicy. I don’t even wanna write about it anymore. Too delicious. And I’ve had plenty of it and don’t need any more of it today. Tomorrow is a brand new day.

Is this your favorite way of roasting pork shoulder?  let us know! We wanna keep testing different approaches all the time. cheers guys! 

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