The Red, White and Blue Meat.
Despite the fact that I started my pull-apart pork with a rub down of kosher salt, or maybe because of it, a miracle has occurred. This morning the smells of Heaven and the sounds of angels could be experienced throughout the house. The angels were making quite a racket as they tried to get into the pork and had to be chased off. The pork was so tender that I attempted to move it by grabbing a protruding bone… and…(tears)…it pulled right out of the meat. Pardon me, I need a moment.
There, all better. Now, I want to make two notes for folks who want to cook pork roasts to the point of melt-in-your-mouth joy. I won’t hit the science of it because I really wasn’t planning on writing this today, but fat is all important. Three things you don’t get to hear a lot in our fat phobic society;
- Fat has a preservative quality (one reason I fear I might never die). The fats in meats help prevent the spread of decay and disease carrying vectors. Copernicus, at the siege of Allenstein prevented the spread of a terrible plague by encasing the coarse bread they made in the city in a thin film of fat (which we now call, butter, or Happy Joy Love if you’re a hippy). If you have a food item that slow cooks and will be sitting out for a bit, fat is your friend.
- The flavor is in the fat. Period. Lean meats, less flavor.
- The nutrition is in the fat. All those happy vitamins and minerals and things necessary for living, they are all stored in the fat. Lean meat is empty calories. Don’t be empty. Quit flushing all that pig’s hard work down the drain by trimming all the fat from a perfectly good roast. Actually, don’t put fat down the drain for any reason, it’s really bad for them.
In the case of the roast we just did, I got the cheapest cut of meat I could find (budgetary concerns). It had a whole slab of fat on one side and almost nothing marbled through the meat itself. I trimmed all that fat and then sectioned the meat so that I could reinsert the fat (which I had rubbed thoroughly with spices so the fat could pass the spice along with the flavor) in the rest of the meat. Nine hours in the crockpot and BAM, God bless America. I should have been holding sparklers when I typed this.
