FEAST MODE Where's the Beef?

In an effort to reconnect with my love of cooking and my love of food I'm taking this weekend to live blog some culinary adventures.  We're starting with pork roast.  It's pork roast not pot roast because I got into a hurry at the store and picked up the wrong kind.  But whatever.  Pork shoulder is good too.  What follows is something I've just made up.  It could be awful.  Life is full of adventure.

Whenever I'm taking a day to cook a lot I like to make sure to get a roast, a chicken or something else that takes a lot of time and only a little effort to make.  I figure that if I'm already spending the day in the kitchen I might as well use the oven or the slow cooker while I'm in there.

Pro tip:  Whenever I'm making something that has one big primary ingredient I try to make sure that the primary ingredient is of a high quality, otherwise the whole dish kind of goes to hell.  In this case, that means getting a really nice piece of pork.  I found a shoulder roast at PCC.  3.8 pounds for about $15 and sustainably raised to boot.  Sure, it costs a little more than the regular kind but it tastes a lot better and there's some research to suggest that all the crap they feed factory raised meat makes its way into the fat storage of the animal so not only are there a multitude of ethical concerns with factory raised meat, it's also probably not very good for you.

I started today by roasting up some bone marrow.

So yes - this would have made a hell of a lot more sense for a pot roast but should still make the pork fatty and delicious.  Marrow bones can usually be found somewhere in the deli section of your grocery store and if you can't find it, ask the butcher.  They always have some on hand.  In this case, I've split the bone with a knife and a hammer and set it to roast at 400 degrees in a roasting pan until it starts to brown.

Before

After

You can't really overcook marrow but if it stays too hot for too long it will render and just be liquid fat which we actually want to save for the next step.

We're bothering with the marrow because I'd like to make a nice braising liquid for the roast.  Braising something means that you have enough liquid for the meat to sit in but not enough to cover it.  I've transferred the marrow into a large pan and rendered it into liquid.

Then I add one very thinly sliced yellow onion and caramelize it on a low heat.

As the onion carmalizes, I add a little beef stock and a little red wine.  We're reducing the beef stock and letting the alcohol boil off the wine.  So the liquid will taste very concentrated and beefy with a little tang to take the thickness off the marrow.

A note on cooking with wine:  As a general rule, I buy whatever's cheapest and use that.  Today, I'm using red wine and so I bought a wine that I also like to drink - Red Table Wine by Townshend Cellers.  If I'm cooking with white wine I buy whatever's $3 and leave it in the fridge until it dies.  I don't drink white wine.

When you're cooking from your brain and not from a recipe it's really important to taste as you go.  That's actually true for regular recipes too.  The great thing about doing that is it prevents you from over or under seasoning your food and also gives you the opportunity to flavor your food exactly the way you want it, not the way the author of the recipe imagined it - and isn't that better?  In this case I'm not adding salt yet because I'm planning on rubbing the roast with salt and herbs before it all goes in the pot.

Speaking of herbs, I've combined rosemary, thyme and kosher salt together and worked them over a bit with dried thyme and rosemary.

Then I rub the roast with it and throw it in the pot along with some large chunks of carrots, a bay leaf and the braising liquid.  From there it goes on low until it's done.

There are several different methods for knowing when a roast is done, but my favorite is a thermometer like this one. It takes the guesswork out of it and only costs about $25.

So there's my roast.  Hopefully the beef/pork combination will be delightful and not completely weird.  I'll keep you posted.