03 May 2014

Rôti de porc au miel et aux épices

Yesterday I cooked a pork roast. It was a boned shoulder roast that had been rolled and tied. I wanted to cook the roast on the rotisserie in our oven. We might not have this oven very much longer and we haven't been able to find a new kitchen stove that has all the features we would like to have, including a rotisserie, so we may have to give it up in some kind of trade-off.

You have to get the roast or fowl position correctly on the skewer to make sure the drippings fall into the pan of water during the cooking.

Anyway, my idea was to baste the pork with a honey-based, spicy sauce before it went into the oven and a couple of times during the cooking process. The ingredients in the basting sauce — sorry, no real recipe, because I was winging it — were 100 grams of thyme-flower honey; a little olive oil; splashes of white wine, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and soy sauce; a pinch of ground cloves and a tablespoon of crushed red pepper flakes; good quantities of minced ginger and minced garlic; and finally, salt and black pepper. I cooked the sauce for a couple of minutes to blend all the flavors and melt the honey, and then I let it cool before spooning some over the roast.

Thanks to friends for bringing us a few little jars of different kinds of honey from Paris.

Getting the meat you want to roast onto the rotisserie is always a trial-and-error process. It's not hard to clamp it on, but it's not easy to judge exactly where you need to position the roast on the skewer. That means putting it on and then putting the whole thing in the oven a couple of times, before you turn the oven on, to see if it's centered properly. It took me three or four tries. That done, I was ready to baste the roast with the marinade and get it on to cook.

The marinade was just slightly syrupy — not too thick and sticky.

I always put a pan of water directly under the roast or chicken that I'm cooking on the rotisserie. The drippings from the meat, including the basting sauce, then fall into the water and don't burn in the bottom of a dry oven pan — you don't want to create a lot of smoke and the process is much cleaner that way. You can always boil down some of the cooking liquid at the end, while the roast rests, to make a dipping sauce if you want one. This pork roast, which weighed about 2½ lbs., or just over a kilogram, and it cooked for two hours at 350ºF (180ºC). I let it rest in a warm oven for 45 minutes before taking it off the skewer and carving it.

9 comments:

  1. Wow, it looks so delicious. You are a gifted cook.

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  2. That really does look scrumptious!
    Meat done on a rotisserie is far more succulent than ordinary oven-cooked meat...
    it self-bastes!!

    We have an old Moulinex rotisserie... in fact we had two...
    my Mum's in Inox which we've kept... and mine in Moulinex 80's Red with an Inox top....
    we let mine go on Freecycle.
    Mum's lives in the barn at the moment, well wrapped up...
    it will be going in the utility on a worktop, along with the deep-fat oilbath....
    and we'll put a cooker hood over them both and pump the smell out into the barn proper.

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  3. What a great way to cook a pork roast. I like chicken cooked with honey so this must have been really delicious and flavorful.

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  4. Love the looks of that honey and the roast itself!

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  5. Just pretend I am Nadege :) (Minds thinking alike ;)

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  6. Honey, ginger, w vineger, r pepper and the rest sounds like a fabulous marinade for many proteins!

    M in OR

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  7. Another great post Ken! It's always interesting to see what your cooking and some of the scrumptious goodies found over there such as you posted back on the 1st in your "J'ai faim ! Pas vous ?". I spent hours on Google trying to figure out what some of the items in the "Un choix d'entrées" image were, I was left unsatisfied. The looks of that food makes me want to take an extended trip to France and eat myself into a coma!

    -craig-

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  8. Hello Craig, nice to hear from you. Those pictures of seafoodand pastries are ones that I took in Rouen nearly a dozen years ago. I wouldn't be of much help in explaining what all those entrées were.

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    1. 12 years ago - no wonder I thought those pastry prices were reasonable!

      M in OR

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