Kitchen Escapades: Slow Roasted Pork Shoulder with a Hawaiian Twist
We are a food-loving household. Bear and I both enjoy cooking and trying new recipes, though our experimentation generally centers on variations of comfort food. If we’ve got cable on, there’s a good chance that Guy Fieri reruns are on, usually on low volume, until inevitably a feature on a Hawaiian restaurant pops up. Then we scramble for the remote and turn up the volume. We’ve noticed that a lot of the featured Hawaiian restaurant proprietors have a focus on slow roasted meat. It’s no surprise that an island group whose traditional peoples smoked whole pigs underground for ceremonial feasts, carries on the tradition of loving slow-cooked meats.
We have wanted to try slow cooking pork for a couple of years now but really never felt we had the time. This was until this holiday season when we were both off from work for a full week. We went to our local Urban Fare and picked up a four-pound pork shoulder. I drew on my Fierian education on what to look for on the roast: fat cap, marbling, pinkish red colour. Though none of the roasts had a fat cap, we picked out the nicest looking piece and took it home.
I looked online for recipes. I found it difficult finding a recipe for a four-pound pork shoulder that drew on Hawaiian flavours. I found a recipe for a “Hawaiian BBQ Pulled Pork Shoulder Sandwich with Grilled Pineapple Relish” written by Jeff Mauro for the Food Network. Because it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, I decided to take my own spin on it.
Marinating the Meat
We have been eye-balling the sweet, crispy crust on roast pork shoulders and knew we wanted to replicate that. In doing that, I wanted to infuse the outer layers of the pork with sweet, sugary flavours. The marinade I ended up creating was not measured, but the recipe was approximately as follows:
Roast Pork Marinade:
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon black pepper
- 2 teaspoons roasted garlic powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon paprika
- ½ teaspoon ground jalapeno chili powder
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon cumin
- 1 cup pineapple juice (or enough to make the marinade mix into a wet paste that will still cling onto the meat)
To make this marinade, mix the ingredients together and rub it into all sides of the meat. Make sure to press the rub into any crevices. Place the meat in a large Ziploc bag and pour the remaining marinade into the bag with it. Place the bag and meat into a bowl and refrigerate overnight.
The next day, take the meat out of the bag and rub off the wet marinade with a paper towel. Make another bowl of the rubbing spices and sugar but exclude the pineapple juice. Rub the dry spices into the meat and place it on a plate. Refrigerate it again for two hours.
Next, preheat the oven to 225℉. Once heated, place the meat directly on the oven rack and place a drip-collecting tray directly below it. Now, the wait begins.
Because we made the roast for our two-person New Years Eve celebration, I wanted it to be ready for about 4:00 p.m. To give a long amount of buffer time, I put the roast in the oven at 5:30 a.m. Yes, you read that correctly.
In my imagination, it’s always best to finish meat shortly before the “safe” temperature, so that it rises to the perfect temperature as it’s taken off the grill or out of the oven. I was surprised to learn that this is not the case for slow roasting. I learned that if you were to take the roast out at an internal temperature of 165℉, it would be safe to eat, but it wouldn’t have the buttery, fall apart texture that is associated with slow roasting.
To achieve that texture, you need to cook the meat to at least 190℉. If you want the meat to have a super soft “pulled pork” texture, go further to 200℉ or 205℉. We were more interested in slicing rather than pulling the pork, so we went for about 193℉.
To get to that temperature, it took about 10 hours. But it still wasn’t done. To get that crispy sweet crust on the pork, you have to take the meat out of the oven and let it rest for 1 hour after it’s cooked. Place it on a plate with a little piece of tin foil tented overtop of it. After it has rested, place it in the oven at 475℉ for twenty minutes to create the crust. Once it comes out of the oven for the final time, let it rest for another 15-20 minutes before chowing down.
When the roast was ready, we cut into it and knew the time we put in was worth it. It fell apart so beautifully without any effort.
I decided to put together the additional fixins as listed in Jeff Mauro’s sandwich recipe. Head to his page here for the full version. I made the sweet chile sauce and grilled pineapple relish to go with the meat, which we put all together on toasted sourdough to make the most glorious Hawaiian roast pork sandwich we could have ever imagined.
As for us, we’ll be eating pork for the next week. We’ll be making more of these sandwiches and incorporating it into a number of dishes. Today I mixed some of the roast into a creamy pasta - it was fantastic! Pork with vegetables on rice is my plan for tomorrow night.
Looking forward to making this dish again, though because of the time it takes it will likely be another special occasion.
