I’m aware that this sounds like it ought to be on the menu at your local Chinese takeaway, but this stuffed and rolled shoulder of pork is really quite special (hence, you know…)
As ever, I’d recommend getting the meat from a proper local butcher – not just because I happen to work at a proper local butcher, but also because the meat is likely to be free range, well hung, and from a pig in this country, and more often than not, this county. Shoulder of pork is a fattier cut than the more traditional leg, but it’s well worth the longer cooking time for perfectly tender meat and crunchy crackling (which is, let’s face it, the best bit).
When you buy it, it’ll most likely be rolled and strung together already – this recipe requires you to cut the strings, unroll the meat, stuff it and then re-roll it – there is a special butcher’s knot for tying meat, but it’s a bit complex and not really necessary if you’re roasting it straight away, so I won’t bother explaining it here.
Ingredients:
Stuffing: 1 large cooking apple, 1 small onion, a large handful of dried apricots, 100g breadcrumbs, 50g butter, salt, pepper
Herb Rub: Two small sprigs of rosemary, a small handful each of sage, thyme and marjoram leaves, 1 1/2 tsp each celery seed (optional) and fennel seeds (not optional), 3 cloves garlic.
Pork Shoulder, about 2 1/2 kg or 5lbs. (Ideally, get this out of the fridge an hour or so before you start cooking, so the skin can dry out and the meat can relax)
Sea salt.
Method:
First, make the stuffing. Peel and core the apple, peel the onion, then roughly chop both of these along with the apricots. In a food processor, whizz all three til they’re finely shredded. In a bowl mix the shredded fruit/veg with the breadcrumbs and butter, and add a good pinch of salt and a few twists of pepper. Mix with your hands until the stuffing can be loosely packed together.
Now make the herb paste. Bash the fennel and celery seeds in a pestle and mortar until roughly ground, then finely chop the herbs and add them to the pestle (or mortar, I forget which is which) with the peeled and squashed garlic cloves. Pound the hell out of the whole lot for a minute or so, then add a drizzle of oil.
Lay out your shoulder of pork skin side down and rub the herb mix into the flesh, then pack the stuffing into a rough roll in the middle of the pork. Re-roll and tie the joint quite tightly (start from the middle, and tie a couple of strings either side of the central one). Some of the stuffing will squeeze out of the ends, but chuck it in the roasting tray with the joint anyway. Place the joint in the tray. If you want perfect crackling, then make sure the skin is as dry as you can make it – rub it with kitchen paper and then rub in some sea salt. Some cook books will tell you to rub oil or butter into the skin – bad idea. That only softens the skin, which is not ideal for crackling.
Put the roast in a preheated oven at 200C for thirty minutes, then turn it down to 150C and give it a further 2/12 hours. You can roast vegetables around the joint in the pan, and the meat should provide plenty of tasty pork fat for roasties, although you can give it a helping hand with some oil or butter (or better yet, goose fat).
Another thing: with any roast meat, take it from the roasting tray and let it rest for about twenty minutes before you carve it (don’t put foil over the pork, keeping the steam in will do terrible things to your crackling) – this lets the fibres of the meat relax and the juices return to the surface. In that time, make gravy in the roasting pan by putting it on the hob over a medium heat, sprinkling some flour into the pan and scraping up all the burnt on bits (the food group of the gods). Pour some liquid into the pan (a mixture of stock and some meat-appropriate liquid – cider, red wine, white wine, sloe gin), bring to the boil and simmer until you have a nice flavoursome gravy. And promptly devour the lot.
(Leftover roast pork can be thinly sliced and ensandwiched with sauerkraut. Surprisingly good.)
