Roast Pork

I love pork...heck I love pigs! They are cute and they are delicious. Several years ago my then fiancee, now husband commissioned a nativity set of pigs for me.  Above you'll see the pig angels, I love pigs with wings.

I didn't eat pork for a while after the movie "Babe" came out but I'm back to eating it now. In China when they talk about meat they mean pork unless they specify otherwise.

Cooking pork can be a little tricky.  It seems to be easy to cook it so that it is too dry.  So I've been trying to figure out how to do a nice pork roast for Sunday supper, something that is...you know...easy.  I was watching America's Test Kitchen (ATK) and they did this.  It looked pretty good but I kind of forgot to do the peach sauce and I didn't quite follow their directions and my pork roast came out pretty good and it was a little easier than their's was, so here's how I did it:

Roast Pork

1 Boneless Boston Butt pork roast (about 4-5 pounds)
1/2 C brown sugar
1/2 C kosher salt

I chose a boneless Boston Butt (shoulder) roast that was about 4-5 pounds.  There wasn't anything bigger and that is what is in the stores around here.  It had some fat on it but not as much as ATK showed in their recipe.

The night before I mixed up the brown sugar and the salt and rubbed it on the roast and put all of that in a plastic bag, in the fridge overnight.

When I came home from church at noon I got the roast out of the fridge and I patted it dry and put it on a rack on one of my sheet pans that I use for a lot of cooking.  I set the oven temperature to 300 degrees and set my thermometer with a probe like this one. to 170 degrees, put the probe in the middle of the roast and put the roast in the oven with the probe wire coming from the oven to the thermometer.  I added water to the bottom of the pan to collect the juices and to stop them from smoking up the oven.  Then I left it all for about 4 hours.  After about 3 hours it didn't seem like it was cooking fast enough so I turned up the temperature to about 325 degrees until the alarm on the probe went off at 170 degrees.

I removed it from the oven and covered it with foil and let it rest for about an hour.  I collected the water and  pork juices from the bottom of the pan and made a nice gravy.

Once the rest of my meal was prepared I sliced the roast and boy was it good. It was moist and tender and delicious.  I'll definitely be doing roast pork again!